The text of this new typesetting has been taken from the scholarly edition of Tender Is the Night published in 2012 as a volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Cambridge text was constructed from the surviving manuscripts and typescripts of the novel, preserved among Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton University Library; from the serialized version, which appeared in Scribner’s Magazine during the first four months of 1934; and from the first edition, published on April 12, 1934.
The story of the composition of Tender Is the Night is complex. Fitzgerald began writing the novel in the summer of 1925, several months after the publication of The Great Gatsby. He hoped to finish a draft by the end of the year, but he struggled with the narrative, putting it through several different versions and drafts before finally publishing it nine years later. Fitzgerald’s revisions and recastings left marks on the published text, creating problems that require editorial attention.
In its earliest form Tender Is the Night was a novel of matricide, based on a sensational murder case in San Francisco in which a young woman named Dorothy Ellingson, portrayed by reporters as a victim of “jazzmania,” shot and killed her mother on January 13, 1925. Fitzgerald transferred this story to the French Riviera and peopled the narrative with sophisticated American expatriates. His protagonist, a hot-tempered young film technician named Francis Melarky, was to fall into the company of a group of expatriates based on Gerald and Sara Murphy and their circle. Francis was to become enraged with his mother, a fortyish matron who was traveling with him, and to kill her in a fit of anger.
Fitzgerald began setting down this improbable story in the late summer of 1925; he pushed ahead with the writing during the fall and winter that followed. In his drafts, nearly all of which are extant, he successfully evokes the magic of expatriate life but fails to establish any motivation that might cause Francis Melarky to murder his mother. Fitzgerald labored intermittently on this version of his novel until 1929. He used various working titles—among them Our Type, The World’s Fair, The Melarky Case, and The Boy Who Killed His Mother—but the material was alien to his temperament, and he was unable to move forward. Fitzgerald was also distracted by the need to produce short fiction for the “slick” magazines, and by the worsening mental condition of his wife, Zelda Sayre.
Fitzgerald completed no new work on his novel in 1929 and 1930. Zelda succumbed to a nervous collapse in April 1930 and was hospitalized, first in Paris and later in Switzerland. Fitzgerald devoted his energies to short stories that would pay for her hospitalization and cover his own expenses. By September 1931 Zelda was well enough to travel; Fitzgerald brought her and their daughter, Scottie, back to the United States. They settled first in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda’s hometown. Later they moved to Baltimore, where Zelda underwent treatment at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins University.
At this point Fitzgerald decided to reconceive his novel. He devised a plan that would allow him to salvage 35,000 words from the existing drafts, add another 115,000 words, and finish the novel by the fall of 1933. As before, the narrative would be set among wealthy Americans living in Europe during the 1920s, but the protagonists would now be Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, and Nicole Warren, his wife. Francis Melarky, in an act of authorial legerdemain, becomes Rosemary Hoyt, a starry-eyed young movie actress. In this new version Dick begins his career as a promising researcher and clinician but disintegrates psychologically and succumbs to a state of “emotional bankruptcy.” Fitzgerald pressed ahead steadily on this version through 1932 and 1933 and delivered a complete manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, in October 1933. By November, Fitzgerald had settled on Tender Is the Night as his final title. The novel was serialized in four installments, from January to April 1934, in Scribner’s Magazine. The book appeared in April.
Fitzgerald had hoped that Tender Is the Night would earn a great deal of money, give a boost to his career, and establish him as one of the most highly respected writers of his generation. None of this came about. Reviews were mixed and sales less than impressive. Discouraged, and suffering from many personal and financial problems, Fitzgerald entered what has come to be known as his “crack-up” period. He was rescued in the summer of 1937 by a contract that sent him to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He held that position for eighteen months, then resumed work as a freelance in January 1939. Two years later, in December 1940, he died—with a novel under way that was published posthumously, in unfinished form, as The Last Tycoon (1941).
In May 1936 and again in April 1938 Fitzgerald attempted to reconceive the published text of Tender Is the Night. He proposed to shift about large blocks of material in order to give the novel a straightforward chronology. In December 1938 he took a copy of the first edition and disbound it, cutting the pages free from the cloth binding. He then rearranged the text into five sections and marked numerous cuts and emendations on the pages. On the front pastedown endpaper he wrote: “This is the final version of the book as I would like it.” His penciled markings, however, extend through only the first two chapters and end on page 160. He either came to recognize, as he worked, that his scheme was impractical, or he put the project on hold and would have pursued it had he lived longer. Nothing resulted from his efforts during his lifetime; the marked copy came to rest among his papers at Princeton.
In the late 1940s the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley, using Fitzgerald’s marked copy, began work on a reordered edition of Tender Is the Night. Cowley followed most of Fitzgerald’s directions but, lacking guidance after page 160, was compelled to make some eight hundred independent emendations and to invent passages of text to cover transitions in the narrative. Cowley’s edition, which appeared in November 1951, received a lukewarm reception. Reviewers and critics debated questions about post-publication revision and authorial intention, and the Cowley version never gained acceptance among readers, teachers, or scholars. Eventually, in the 1970s, this version fell out of print.
The present edition of Tender Is the Night follows the 1934 ordering of the text. Fitzgerald did not anticipate the near impossibility of taking a text that he had composed with one chronology in mind and shifting its parts about to create a radically different temporal structure. The 1934 text—the only coherent version ever published—is the text represented in this edition.
The internal chronology of the 1934 text requires adjustment. Does the novel occupy four years, from 1925 to 1929, or five years, from 1925 to 1930? In his preliminary notes for the reconceived novel, set down in 1932, Fitzgerald indicates that the story is to end in July 1929. The American stock market will crash in October of that year; the unsuspecting pleasure-seekers in the final scene of the novel are poised on the brink of financial ruin and will be punished for their fecklessness. This is a satisfying conclusion, but if one goes by the evidence of both the serial and the book texts, the narrative does not end in July 1929. It ends in July 1930. Fitzgerald, as he wrote, extended the action by one year to accommodate new scenes and to lengthen Dick Diver’s period of disintegration, making his fall seem less precipitate. By ending the novel in 1930, Fitzgerald is suggesting a different moral. The lesson now is that the wealthy idlers on the French Riviera have been largely untouched by the downturn in the American economy. The rich never have to pay. They retrench, pursue their amusements, and wait for the economy to recover.
A few signs of internal chronology remain in the 1934 text from Fitzgerald’s original plan to end the novel in 1929. Five emendations, on two pages, are required to set the time scheme right. These emendations, keyed by page and line number, are given below. The first reading is the emended reading from the present edition; the bracket should be read as “emended from”; the reading following the bracket is from the first edition.
269.9 last three ] last four
269.16 three years ] four years
269.17 thirty-five ] thirty-four
269.17 twenty-one ] twenty-two
274.5 twenty-one ] twenty-two
In the rush toward publication, many proper nouns (particularly place names) were misspelled in the first edition. These have been corrected in the present edition. Like most authors, Fitzgerald was inconsistent in matters of word division, punctuation, and spelling. His most common treatments of compound words, pointing, and orthography, established by reference to his holograph drafts, are used in this text. Fitzgerald followed most conventions of American spelling but preferred some British forms—“theatre,” for example, and “grey.” These British spellings are employed here. Fitzgerald wanted to use italics only for emphasis in dialogue. His wishes are followed in this text; names of ocean liners, titles of books, and names of musical works are rendered in roman type.
Readers interested in a detailed history of the composition of Tender Is the Night, and in an extended discussion of editorial principles, should consult the Cambridge Edition.
James L. W. West III
General Editor
Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald