Why am I drawn to dark and destructive stories of breakage and damage in beautiful settings?

Please don't answer this question. It is better danced away in a glorious Antibes summer night!

Tender is the literature that touches on the invisible abyss underneath the perfect reflection in the surface.

This was Fitzgerald's last book, the one after The Great Gatsby. It is extremely well-written and equally extremely depressing. There is murder and incest and the hapless Dick aimlessly looking for meaning in life and never quite finding it. It is definitely worth reading after you have finished Gatsby, but not recommended if you are already feeling blue because it will definitely not cheer you up. The language is superb though and therefore I gave it 4 stars.

In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway speaks extensively about Scott Fitzgerald and his relationship with Zelda. The portrait of both is far from favourable, almost caricatural, with a Scott looking like a boy but “with a mouth like a girl’s” and behaving equally immaturely, with episodes of hypochondria, drunkenness and naïveté. On the other hand, Zelda behaves like a shrew, despising her husband as a man, resenting his talent and pushing him to drink even more because her jealousy of his writing.

But Hemingway’s conclusion, that “scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane” is not necessarily true. In fact, many a reader thinks that his last novel, Tender Is the Night, is even better than The Great Gatsby (although not me, I have to confess, for I am forever mesmerized by the latter).

It seems that the plot of Tender Is the Night, inspired by his own tragic marriage, was already in the author’s mind during those crazy years in Paris. In the same book I mentioned before, Hemingway recalls the first time Scott Fitzgerald told him the story of his marriage, and even though later he would be given other versions of the same story, “as though trying them for use in a novel”, he always felt that the first one was the truest and the saddest:

“and he started to tell me the outline of his life with zelda. he told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at st-raphael about a year ago.”

(N.B. the absence of caps is Hemingway’s doing not mine

For the longest time I lived an F. Scott Fitzgerald free existence. The name was familiar enough although I mostly associated it with those bulky Penguin Classics which are prone to making me break out in a cold-sweat. Weighty tomes burdened by commentary on class difference, forbidden or tormented or doomed romance, some of which are drier than a mouthful of Jacob's Crackers.

I am F. Scott Fitzgerald-free no longer! And how glad does this make me? Very. I read The Great Gatsby a couple of months ago and decided to go for a second hit with Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald's almost autobiographical tale of gilt edged glitz which conceals the slow ripening of mental decay on the French Riviera.

But first I need to get the childishness out of the way. I approached this book with all literary seriousness - arched eyebrow, wire rimmed glasses and a suitable severe chignon and after a medium sized smirk at introduction to the principle character with the manly moniker, Dick Diver, I was prepared to be serious again. Then it hit me.

Page 4. There it was.
"Lucky Dick, you big stiff" he whispered to himself.

And then I rolled off the sofa, laughing. And so begins my encounter with Tender is the Night, which is otherwise quite serious but in places, far from tender.

Published in 1934, at a time of economic austerity, Fitzgerald's emotionally disturbed tale of rich people being a bit sad, but still being rich, was not well received and was soundly panned in a number of reviews. Presumably the people of America waved their empty plates, wiped the dust from their eyes and shouted "Yes life is not great but try an empty belly, Dust Pneumonia and burying your own children".

Mental health and sexual abuse, are by no means, trifling issues and they are key issues in Tender is the Night, however set against a back drop of yachts, lavish parties and luxury mansions at a time of national economic catastrophe, well presumably they just seemed a bit less important.

Add to this to the fact that frankly, none of the characters are particularly likeable, well you can see why people looked askance at the time. Dick Diver falls into a number of unfortunate but obvious traps. Marries way out of his league, marries a mentally unstable patient with whom he was originally professionally involved and then to cap it all, has an affair. Way to go Dick. I'm pretty sure that the Hippocratic oath probably says "don't do this" against all of these possible actions.

Because this book is based on Fitzgerald's own experiences with his wife Zelda it is better than Gatsby. Not happier, not brighter, not more exhilarating to read but it has a clarity that makes the characters more real. After all, nobody said you had to like them or their actions.

To me this is the best work of Scott Fitzgerald. It's his most elaborated story. The core theme is the disintegration of a person through alcohol and relationship problems. There are some discrepancies in the structure of the novel, but it's a very nice read. Rating 3.5 stars.

When Fitzgerald finished this gem, he was stunned by the poor reviews it received. I honestly think it's a profoundly more true and powerful book than Gatsby ever will be. His effortless and viceral writing tells a story of such complex and accurate human relationships, I often find myself reflecting on Dick Diver as a friend I should check up on, and part of me thinks I spent a year of my youth hanging out on the French Riveria having too much to drink, but somehow pulling it off sophistication. Now that I sound like a lunatic, I must express this is not normal for me. The world and characters really got under my skin. After my first reading I woke myself by weeping...and I was weeping for the characters. That has never before or since happened to me. It is a work of profound beauty and pain about the resilience of the human spirit. If you're feeling the world is too glib, I feel this is a great antidote.

My paperback copy has post it notes stuck on pages where I loved a quote, an idea, a tie in to something else, and just a part of the story I enjoyed. Fitzgerald crafts a sentence that just explodes with emotion and thought. I enjoyed this one immensely. So much that I splurged on a copy of Matthew Bruccoli's work on the composition of this book- which is amazing judging from my brief sifting through it.

I plan to update this review a bit more once I learn more on this book's background.

Just finished Tender Is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald having previously read it about 15 years ago.

Almost as good as The Great Gatsby, but not quite.

Yet again I got very caught up in the mood of the book and particularly enjoyed the account of early tourism on the French Riviera in the late 1920s with the beautiful and hedonistic Divers.

From there it's a semi-autobiographical tale of deterioration, unfulfilled potential, disappointment, and disillusionment - all beautifully written, painfully so.

It is suffused with the glamour of Fitzgerald's own life, in particular his marriage to the lovely but unbalanced Zelda, a marriage which ultimately failed. This contributed to Fitzgerald's sense that, like Dick Diver, he was a ruined and unrealised individual.

A splendid read.

4/5


More about Tender Is the Night....

Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans to visit. Among the most fashionable are psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, who hold court at their villa. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that hold them together. As Dick draws closer to Rosemary, he fractures the delicate structure of his marriage and sets both Nicole and himself on to a dangerous path where only the strongest can survive. In this exquisite, lyrical novel, Fitzgerald has poured much of the essence of his own life; he has also depicted the age of materialism, shattered idealism and broken dreams.

I have always loved this early section...

They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose — Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them — not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the ONLY man with repose —”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“— but he may be the only sober man with repose.”

A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched — whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.

A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point — that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers — made a bet with Dick of five dollars.

His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again — the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair .

With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.

“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”

VIDEORECENSIONE https://youtu.be/OaU2AKV_2yU

Avevo provato a cominciare questo libro durante l'ultimo anno di liceo, l'ho concluso cinque anni dopo, poiché mi è ritornato in mente più volte durante tutto l'arco del 2022.
Mi è piaciuto immensamente, sia nelle descrizioni che per l'andamento dei personaggi, ho adorato questo testo molto di più del suo romanzo più famoso.
Ho visto molte recensioni negative, soprattutto rispetto alla struttura del romanzo e per il suo andamento poco sincronico: per me il fatto che a ogni capitolo si cambiasse registro ha affascinato tantissimo, soprattutto la seconda parte riesce a porre uno spartiacque enorme, in grado di farti comprendere quanto davvero non sia tutto oro ciò che luccica, mentre nel primo veniamo rapiti dal mondo che circonda costantemente Rosemary, dal suo modo naif di vederlo e di rimanerne ammaliata, che poi certamente matura e cambia.
Leggere la postfazione è stato cruciale per comprendere ancora di più perché mi fosse piaciuto così tanto questo romanzo, sapere quanto riprenda la vita dell'autore e quanto siano personali le vicende ha portato l'amore a dismisura.

We first meet Dick and Nicole Diver on the beach in the south of France. They are a golden couple, beautiful and rich. All those around them are slightly in awe, especially Rosemary Hoyt, a very young actress who immediately convinces herself she’s fallen in love with Dick.
The Divers epitomise cool, they are self assured, well travelled and fashionable - they belong to a set of well off Americans who drift around Europe, sometimes with purpose, some times indolently.
Rosemary is accepted into the Diver’s set and is one of several important characters that float in and out of the narrative - a narrative that meanders lazily in the sun, occasionally punctuated by short bursts of violence or high drama.
Tender is the Night plays out in the post WWI world of the Jazz Age ‘..... the broken universe of wars ending ....’ as Americans flood into Europe, rich, confident, sometimes flashy and Europeans emerge jaded and blinking from the shadows of conflict.
This is a tale of inappropriate relationships and marriage breakdown, of facades crumbling and dreams fading.
Aspects of the author’s own life are inevitably woven into the storyline ...... failed love, infidelity, alcoholism, the spectre of mental illness and a constant preoccupation with money.
Knowing a little about Fitzgerald, much of the story felt raw and desperate. There’s a sadness that grows throughout the book and lingers after turning the the last page (or reaching 99%!)
Some of the text is a bit wordy and whole dissertations could be written (and have been!) about the questionable attitudes of characters concerning race, gender, politics etc ........ but I love Fitzgerald’s writing, the lyricism, the soul bearing melancholy, and the sense of time and place.
This is my second reading of this novel after many years and I enjoyed it a lot.

To be fair, this really wasn't Fitzgerald's fault.

I love The Great Gatsby and I love The Beautiful and the Damned. And, as my dedication to The List proves, I love reading about rich white people and their Rich White People Problems. But everything about this book rubbed me the wrong way, for the following reasons (none of which, as I said, are Fitzgerald's fault. Well, maybe the last one.):

I first started this as an audiobook, which is a medium that I'm trying to get into thanks to my 40-minute commute to work. The problem is, it might be time to admit that I'm just bad at audiobooks. When the words aren't printed on the page in front of me, my mind tends to wander and suddenly I realize that the narrator is still talking and I haven't been paying attention for the past five minutes and am totally lost. This is a problem, particularly with this book, when you really have to pay attention to every word. But all of that wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that...

This particular recorded version sucked. First, I was completely misled about the plot because the synopsis on the audiobook made it sound like Rosemary was the protagonist, so once I got to Book Two and the narrator kept talking about Nicole I didn't understand what was happening. Also, the particular narrator for this audiobook was awful. His voices were just bad: grating and stupid, and I couldn't understand why he made all the characters sound so plummy and old. Everyone in this book sounded like they were sixty, which is simply wrong.

After soldiering on to about the 3/4 point, I admitted defeat and found a print copy of the book at the library and started reading where the audiobook had left off. I was spared the annoying narration, and by this point had figured out who the protagonists really were, but I still hated the book. And here's why:

I don't care about these characters. Usually I can find some sympathy for Fitzgerald's fascinating and damaged people, but not here. It was probably a result of my bad experience with the audiobook for the majority of the story, but for whatever reason I could not muster so much as an ounce of sympathy or appreciation for these selfish, stupid, rich jerks who can't seem to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to realize how thoroughly they've fucked up their lives. I found myself wishing that all the characters would get shipped to the Congo so they could learn what real suffering looks like, and then I knew that the book could never be redeemed in my eyes.

I'm sorry, Scott. I think you're a genius, I really do, but I have never struggled so much to get through the final twenty pages of a book as I did with yours. Maybe I'll return to this story in twenty years or so, and hopefully then I'll read this under better circumstances. Again, it's really not your fault.

Except the misogyny. That is 100% your fault, you smug self-satisfied patronizing jackass.

How is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted to young girls, has no goal in life except to make himself useful to damsels in distress, and drinks away his career and marriage, ending up a mere shadow of his former self? Is one supposed to regard him as a tragic hero? Is one to sympathise with him? And if one does sympathise with him, is that because of the way he was written, or rather because we are aware that he is a thinly veiled version of the author himself, a giant of early-twentieth American literature?

Those were some of the questions I pondered after reading Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last finished novel, and possibly his most autobiographical one. Set in France and Italy in the 1920s, it tells the story of two wealthy American expats, Dick and Nicole Diver (largely based on the author and his wife Zelda), who seem to others the most glamorous couple ever, 'as fine-looking a couple as could be found in Paris', but are finding their private lives increasingly less glamorous. We first see the couple through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, a young and naive American actress holidaying in Europe. Rosemary falls madly in love with suave Dick, but also admires angelic Nicole. After about 130 pages during which Rosemary hangs out with the Divers and nearly embarks on an affair with Dick, the narrative stops and goes back in time to tell the story of Dick and Nicole's marriage, which is considerably more complicated than Rosemary realises. Nicole, it turns out, has a history of mental illness, and Dick is both her husband and the doctor treating her -- a recipe for disaster, obviously.

Being a tale of needy people, broken relationships, loss of purpose and wasted potential, Tender Is the Night is quite a depressing read, and one's appreciation of it largely depends on one's tolerance for that kind of thing. If you like your books bleak and tragic, chances are you'll appreciate Tender Is the Night. If not, you might want to steer clear of it.

I generally love a good tragedy, but I confess I wasn't overly impressed with Tender Is the Night. For a book which has garnered so many rave reviews, I found it remarkably flawed. Fitzgerald himself seems to have somewhat agreed with me. Despite referring to Tender Is the Night as his masterpiece and being shocked by its lack of critical and commercial success, he began reconstructing it a few years before his death, placing the flashback chapters at the beginning and making all the textual alterations required by this change. However, he died before he could finish the project, or perhaps he abandoned the project as not worth completing (no one seems to know for sure). A friend of his, Malcolm Cowley, then completed the revision, and for years this was the standard edition of the book. However, the Cowley version has fallen into scholarly disfavour (or so Penguin informs me), and several publishers, Penguin included, now use the first edition, the one that Fitzgerald thought needed revision. Apparently, there are no fewer than seventeen versions of the novel extant, which says much about how satisfied Fitzgerald was with his own work. My guess? Not very much.

I read a version based on the first edition of the book, and to be honest, I can see why Fitzgerald felt it needed some work. Tender Is the Night felt very disjointed to me. To a certain extent, this was because of the aforementioned non-linear structure, which felt a bit jarring to me. However, as far as I'm concerned, that is not the book's only problem, nor even its biggest one. What most annoyed me was the way in which the perspective keeps shifting. Fitzgerald uses an omniscient narrator in Tender Is the Night, but not consistently so; the story is always written from a certain character's perspective. Sometimes the perspective is Rosemary's, sometimes it's Dick or Nicole's; even the minor characters have stretches of the story told from their perspectives, often on the same page as a main character's perspective. To me, these shifts in point of view often felt haphazard, not to mention a little jarring. I didn't think they were particularly effective, either, as they hardly build on each other and don't provide any information that couldn't be gleaned from a 'regular' omniscient narrator. I may be in a minority here, but I think the book would have benefited from a more consistent approach to perspective.

The story itself is a bit haphazard, as well. It occasionally drags, it has little plot, and there are quite a few scenes and storylines which don't really go anywhere. Among several other seemingly unlikely scenes, the book contains a murder, a shooting and a duel, none of which is fully integrated into the story, and none of which is given proper significance. Scenes are introduced and then left so randomly that you have to wonder why Fitzgerald bothered to include them at all. At the risk of being unkind and judgemental, I guess that's what being an alcoholic will do for an author: it gives you wild ideas, but prevents you from carrying them out properly.

Which brings me to the characterisation. I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but I felt that Fitzgerald's vaunted characterisation was a bit 'off' in this novel. Many of the minor characters are sketchily drawn, whereas the main characters are described well (sometimes brilliantly so), but never properly explained. While Fitzgerald does a good (and occasionally excellent) job of sharing his protagonists' feelings, he hardly ever bothers to explain their motivations. This particularly bothered me in the parts written from Dick Diver's point of view, as Dick is supposed to be a psychiatrist. By rights, he should be analysing people actions and motivations all the time, and asking lots of questions. However, Dick hardly ever asks questions. He does not even ask himself questions. He never wonders why he is so drawn to young girls, or what it is in him that causes him to need to be their saviour. He just observes other people in a way of which any intelligent person (trained psychologist or not) would be capable, and then describes their behaviour in a few felicitous phrases. For this and other reasons, I didn't buy Dick Diver as a psychiatrist. Fitzgerald may have read up on psychology (and undoubtedly learned a lot from the doctors who treated his own wife), but I never found his alter ego convincing as a psychiatrist, let alone a brilliant psychiatrist. To me, Dick has 'writer' written all over him.

It's a pity I kept finding such flaws, because Tender Is the Night obviously had the potential to be amazing. It has all the right ingredients: interesting (albeit snobbish and bored) characters, powerful themes, evocative (albeit frequently vague) writing, you name it. And the story certainly doesn't lack in pathos. It is quite harrowing to watch Dick Diver, a supposedly brilliant and popular man who never lives up to his potential and is increasingly torn asunder by money, alcoholism and his failed marriage to a mentally ill woman, go to pieces, becoming, in his own words, 'the Black Death' ('I don't seem to bring people happiness any more'). The fact that this was Fitzgerald writing about himself, about his own frustrations and shattered dreams, adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Even so, Tender Is the Night ended up leaving me fairly cold, as I simply didn't care for Dick enough to be genuinely moved by his descent into failure. While others may find Dick a swell guy, I myself found his complacency and lack of purpose grating, his alcoholism exasperating, and his brilliance skin-deep. I seem to be alone in this opinion, but I stand by it.

In summary, then, I enjoyed and admired aspects of Tender Is the Night, but I don't think they add up to a great whole. While I appreciate Fitzgerald's brutal honesty and the masterful way in which he evokes mutual dependence, isolation and frustration, I can't shake off the feeling that the book could have been much better than it ended up being. And this pains me, as I hate wasted potential as much as Fitzgerald himself seems to have done. As it is, Tender Is the Night is in my opinion not just a book about wasted potential, but an example of wasted potential. It is fitting, I suppose, but no less disappointing for that.

3.5 stars, rounded down to three because I really didn't like it as much as many of the books I have given four stars lately.