Rosemary is a young movie scarlet on vacation in the French Rivera, with her mother. It is there that she meets the handsome psychologist Dick Diver and falls madly in love with him. The only problem is Dick is married and his wife, Nicole, a sophisticated socialite is just as lovable. While this magnetic couple draw in admirers and bask in the social spotlight, things are not as perfect as they seem. Tender is the Night is an exploration into a degenerating marriage and the differences between what people project publicly verses what is really happening under the surface.

In 1932 Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalised for schizophrenia, although there have been huge debates since as to whether she should have been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder (if it was classified back then) instead. While Zelda was being treated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she had a burst of creativity. Over six weeks she wrote her only novel Save Me the Waltz which was published the same year. The novel was semi-autobiographical and when F. Scott Fitzgerald read it he was furious that she shared so much of their personal life within the book. Even though Scott shares a lot of their lives in his own novels, the anger may have to do with the fact he planned to use the material for his next novel Tender is the Night. It is hard to tell how much of Scott’s novel is based on real life and how much is just written in anger towards his wife, I will have to read Save Me the Waltz to make up my own mind.

While Nicole Diver is heavily based on Zelda Fitzgerald, it is up to the reader to make up their mind about Dick and if F. Scott Fitzgerald based this character on himself. I personally think there is a lot of Scott in this character and he wants to portray himself as the handsome, intelligent husband that is devoted to his wife, looking after her through her mental illness. However this is where it gets a bit passive aggressive; Tender is the Night chronicles the downward spiral of Dick Diver’s life. As the novel progresses you begin to see just how this lifestyle and his marriage effects Dick to the point where he is nothing but a shell of his former self.

There are some interesting themes worth exploring within this novel; for me I was mostly interested in the ideas of appearance and reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s thoughts about being married. There is such beauty within the writing, but then there is so much sadness to be found as well. I found this to be a heart-breaking novel and the fact that this is based so much on his own marriage just makes things worse. I’m planning to read Save Me the Waltz very soon, just so I can compare the two novels.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...

September 2021 reread

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He had lost himself - he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year... Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.

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This is such a rich, dense and diffuse book that it's hard to do a quick 'what it's about' statement without simplifying and reducing and, in the process, erasing what makes it so marvellous. It is about idealism, especially in relation to love and the consequent disillusion, as so many of FSF's books are. But it's also about what happens to a good, potentially brilliant, man who makes a wrong choice because of his own vulnerability to beauty and because he wants to be loved - but who ends up selling his soul to an icon of capitalist wealth.

The toxic marriage of the Divers is reflected in that of the comically awful McKiscos, and Dick's gradual slide from bonhomie into full-blown alcoholism is forecast by the fate of his friend, Abe North. Power shifts within these marriages and it is usually the women who survive - perhaps a marker of FSF's own bitterness?

But there are also interesting political narratives: Dick identifies WW1 as a key moment for the death of two empires and the potential emergence of the US as a world power - only the book seems to show the terrible debasement of American cultural potential (and is Dick himself a kind of personification of America's destiny?) from the 'glamour' of Hollywood which is built on a 12-year old girl being pushed into an acting career by her ambitious mother, to the spectacle of the shooting of 'The Grandeur that was Rome' using a fake set despite actually being in the authentic Rome.

There are pointed comments on American letters ('McKisco was having a vogue. His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him' - ouch!), and on American money ('the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly'). And Dick himself is essentially bought by the Warrens who see him as an asset to be managed for their maximum benefit ('...whatever Dick's previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use'), just as Rosemary's loving mother invests in putting her on stage as a child in order to get the returns later.

But because this is FSF, it's never quite this reductive: Nicole, especially, is a shifting character who moves from youthful vulnerability as a response to traumatic abuse, to something much harder and slicker and shows herself adept at wielding the power that is her legacy from her stupendously wealthy Chicago family. In fact, it's the women in the book - Nicole, Rosemary, Mary North - who are shown to be the survivors, who step up and forward, who abandon their American husbands and lovers for 'foreign' men: French Tommy Barban, the Valentino-alike Italian actor, and the 'Kabyle-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu' Conte di Minghetti who 'was not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of Mason-Dixon' but who displaces Abe North and gives Mary a social cachet and money to rival the Divers.

There is a tremendous focus on acting and performance ('Oh, we're such actors - you and I'; 'She ought to be in the cinema... that's where all American women would be happy') and a disturbing dynamic of older men with younger, even child-like, women from the title of Rosemary's film, 'Daddy's Girl', to Nicole's past which seems to set a pattern for her first marriage.

Amidst all this, is a harrowing portrait of a toxic love that still leaves behind an aching melancholy and regret: 'It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other'.

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Greater than Gatsby

Gatsby may be Fitzgerald's great popular success, but I've always preferred this book. Opening on the just-emerging French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver are the perfect couple: beautiful, charming, wealthy and in love. But the flawless surface hides its secrets well - and beneath the glamour lies something tainted and corrupt...

This is less tight as a novel than Gatsby, but is more tragic and harrowing. Fitzgerald clearly struggled with the book, attempting to re-order the chronology before he died. In places brutal and savage, this is also desperately sad with a wistful and poignant fragility that is made all the clearer through the parallels with the Fitzgeralds' own lives.

Subtle and elusive, this remains for me Fitzgerald's best work.

i knew a dick once. his name was sam, and he was a star. people gravitated toward him everywhere he went. i did, too. he radiated light and fun and when he talked to you, he made you feel like the most important person in the room. he partied hard, and he was the type of person you wanted to party with, because it was always a good time. he was the son of a diplomat, knew five languages, and always knew exactly what to say or do to get the situation how he wanted it. when i was about sixteen, we spent an amazing weekend together, that took us from manhattan to new jersey to connecticut, all for good reason, and it was one of the most memorable weekends of my life.

we talked very infrequently for the next few years, and then we hit it back up again, online, and he was such a blast to talk to. so we made plans to meet up. but i was older and wiser then. and as much as i wanted to be with him, to breathe in his intensity, his vitality, i was more guarded. id been burned by then. by friends who were fun and energetic but weren't, when it came down to it, there in any meaningful way. there was one in particular who taught me that lesson... and when sam inevitably disappointed me, i stood my ground. i didnt want to be friends with someone like that. i said that i wanted to believe he wasnt like that, that he was all the positive things i knew to be true but also reliable--that he was reliable--but that now i knew he wasnt.

i wanted him to fight for me. to show me i was wrong. if he had insisted, i'm sure i would have continued to be friends with him. and it wasnt like a hard line was drawn in the sand or anything. but he just wasnt interested in continuing a friendship with someone who maybe wasnt as dazzled by him anymore, i think. but as things worked out, that was the last time i spoke to him. he died four years ago. that they held memorial services in literally ten different countries. so, see, i'm not exaggerating the effect he had on people.

i'm not sure what my point is, except that dick reminded me of sam. and like sam... dick was a remarkable character. i was so disappointed in his decisions, wanted to be disgusted by his actions... but somehow, what i really felt, was empathy. love. pity. there's so much pain in this book, so much longing, so much sorrow. i dont know. i guess maybe life is just hard for everyone, and when faced head on with that, it's hard to begrudge him his choices.