F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), is a novel of tragic convergence. Over the course of the story, the principal characters, with their varied histories and conflicting aspirations, are moving slowly but surely toward one another. When they finally gather in a “stifling” room of the Plaza Hotel for an intimate party on a hot summer day, their troubled interrelationships boil over into a full-scale confrontation, setting in motion the book’s disastrous conclusion. In Tender Is the Night (published nearly ten years later), Fitzgerald revisits the socioeconomic milieu of Gatsby, but in a manner that is more intricate, more intriguing, and, in many ways, more rewarding; and he does so by inverting the earlier book’s convergent structure, crafting instead a novel of tragic entropy.
To begin, Fitzgerald carefully constructs an oasis of time and place. The setting is a resort town on “the pleasant shore of the French Riviera” where the Mediterranean Sea—enclosed by the landmasses of Europe and Africa—ensures a mild and forgiving climate. The time is 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War and four years before the onset of the Great Depression. The month is June, two months after the region’s regular vacationers have returned to their harried lives in London and Paris. Thus, both geographically and temporally the story begins at a comfortable distance from inclement weather and worldly events.
Within this congenial setting, on a quiet beach, a small group of expatriates are drawn together by Dick Diver, a charismatic and self-possessed man of thirty-four. The eleven characters—Dick and his wife Nicole, Abe and Mary North, Albert and Violet McKisco, Mrs. Abrams, Messrs. Barban, Campion, and Dumphry, and the starlet Rosemary Hoyt—appear, at first glance, to be a ragtag ensemble. Variously, they are older and younger, married and single, heterosexual and gay, arrived and aspiring. But we quickly realize that the individuals are more alike than not. They are mostly white Americans between the ages of twenty and forty who can afford a Mediterranean jaunt, and who share a similar sense of sophistication, whether they have attained it yet, or not. So, while they may not all know each other, we get the sense that it would take ten minutes of conversation for any two of them to find someone they know in common.
Most important, what the cast shares is a state of refined liberty. They are free from the dangers and hardships of the war era. Thanks to their financial wherewithal, they have the luxury of not working (Dick is taking an extended holiday from psychiatry, Rosemary from acting, Abe from composing, and Albert from writing). And thanks to the strength of the postwar dollar, they are free from most of life’s inconveniences, their daily necessities seen to by anonymous intermediaries—the bartenders, bellboys, chauffeurs, cooks, concierges, gardeners, maids, nannies, stewards, valets, and waiters who populate the novel like a shadow cast of characters.
Dick invites the ensemble for dinner at his and Nicole’s home, the Villa Diana. There, they sit at a candlelit table at the edge of a beautiful garden overlooking the Mediterranean—an oasis within an oasis within an oasis. But as this cozy party draws to a close, Fitzgerald initiates a narrative of dissolution that is as relentless as it is thorough.
Having begun in its protected little corner of the Mediterranean, the novel starts skipping across nations, touching down in various cities of France, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. Similarly, having begun as a day-by-day account, the plot takes off on a dizzying journey across time. After describing a few weeks in 1925, Fitzgerald turns the clock back, but he does not simply revisit a specific moment to ground and inform his tale. Rather, having described an encounter with Dick and Nicole in 1919, he recedes further to when they first met in 1917, and then further still to the unsettling events of Nicole’s childhood. Once the narrative catches up to itself in the “present,” it does not resume its initial leisurely pace. It advances in fits and starts, carefully detailing a few hours in one chapter and dispensing with whole years in another.
By leaping from setting to setting and period to period, Fitzgerald gives readers some taste of the disorientation that the characters experience in their lives. As the chapters progress, the eleven who were gathered at the Divers’ table become increasingly far-flung, their socioeconomic standings shuffled, friendships strained, romantic pairings broken, and individual egos either tested or dismantled.
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As the novel unfolds, Fitzgerald makes it clear that the most damning forces of dissolution in our lives come from within. He suggests that the very liberties that secure our idlest hours can dissociate us from life by distancing us from meaningful experiences, weakening our emotional bonds, and undermining our sense of self.
Fitzgerald establishes this theme early, calling into question the authenticity of his characters’ experiences by describing their carefree actions in theatrical terms. At the Divers’ party, the Villa Diana is referred to as a “stage,” while the dinner table is a “mechanical dancing platform” and the Divers are like “charming figures in a ballet.” Later that night when Rosemary comes upon Campion weeping, she touches him on the shoulder after recalling a “scene in a rôle she had played.” Thus, while the characters’ stay on the Riviera may be colorful and entertaining, Fitzgerald suggests it has the substance of a charade.
Throughout the opening chapters there is often music playing, but it is almost always in the distance. At one point, Rosemary hears “mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets,” at another she hears “from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ,” and then dance music from “somewhere in the hills behind the hotel.” Like the theatrical language, the recurrence of the distant music gives us a nagging impression that the real celebration of life is happening not in the Divers’ cozy sphere but somewhere else altogether.
Fitzgerald emphasizes the theme of dissociation in his descriptions of the Divers. As Dick plans his dinner party, he looks out at Cannes through a telescope, then announces the guest list to Nicole over a megaphone (much as later he will look at an historic battlefield through a periscope and field glasses). For all Dick’s joie de vivre, Fitzgerald suggests that our protagonist often stands at some remove from life. Nicole can be seen walking through her garden wearing an “artificial camellia on her shoulder” and a “lilac scarf,” her costume flowers clashing, in a way, with the organic ones in abundance around her. A moment later, she listens “to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house,” at once free from the inconveniences of parenthood (thanks to the governess), but strikingly aloof from the concerns of her children, who are almost as invisible in this novel as the servants.
As noted, the principal male characters have the liberty of not working, but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear that they are ambivalent about their idleness, often speaking of the work they’re not doing in defensive terms. In American culture, one is closely identified with one’s profession, so an extended hiatus can undermine one’s sense of self, especially when, as in Dick’s case, the hiatus is paid for with the wife’s inherited wealth.
While the Divers were spared the harsher realities of the war (spending its culminating years in the safety of Switzerland), Fitzgerald implies that this stroke of good fortune has lead to a certain frivolousness. He does so by invoking military imagery to describe the couple in contexts that could not be less warlike. Dick sometimes looks back on the parties he has given “as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered.” When Nicole arrives at an Italian train station, her management of a mountain of luggage “was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply officer.” And when the couple attends a dance during a ski trip, the footwork of the crowd is “as thunderous as spurred boots in war.” Fitzgerald highlights the Divers’ comfortable distance from the realities of war when, heading north, they visit the trenches of Beaumont-Hamel as tourists, and Dick schools Abe on elements of military history despite the fact that Abe is the one who actually saw combat.
Once the characters settle in Paris, their gay itinerary of dining, shopping, and romancing is interrupted by two homicidal acts. On a train platform, they see an acquaintance shoot her presumed paramour twice with a revolver. “Then, as if nothing had happened, the lives of the Divers and their friends flowed into the street.” Shortly thereafter, an Afro-European with whom Abe has become acquainted is stabbed in the Divers’ hotel and dies on Rosemary’s bed. Having coordinated the quiet removal of the body, Dick assures Rosemary “you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some nigger scrap.” In both cases, the characters betray their callousness by showing utter indifference to the victims, focusing instead on how unsettled or inconvenienced they are by the turn of events.
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Over the course of the novel, the forces of entropy take their toll on various characters, but especially on Dick. In the late 1920s, Dick attempts to resurrect his career and his marriage by buying into a Swiss clinic with his wife’s money, a venture that proves to be too little too late. Deeply dissatisfied, Dick lies to Nicole and his partner that he is headed to a psychological conference, and instead goes on a private holiday. Here, Fitzgerald crafts a riveting crescendo of dissolution in which many of the novels central motifs are revisited to harrowing effect.
Continuing the pattern of geographic dislocation, Dick sets off on a whirlwind tour, traveling from Zürich to Munich, Innsbruck, New York, Virginia, and Naples until finally arriving in Rome—all in a matter of ten pages.
On this journey, characters from the 1925 dinner reappear like ghosts, each highlighting some manner in which our protagonist has failed in his life. In Munich, Dick runs into Tommy Barban in a bar. “You’ve been touring?” Dick asks. “Yes, we have been touring,” Tommy responds, ironically. For in fact, he has just returned from Communist Russia where he has fought members of the Red Guard in order to rescue a prince. If this stinging reminder of his lack of service were not enough, on the following morning Dick is woken by the sound of marching feet, which turns out to be “a long column of men in uniform, wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in frock coats and silk hats, burghers, aristocrats, plain men,” in a word, “men.” The veterans, presumably, have earned the right to be mournful, having lost comrades in the heat of battle, but it is Dick who bursts into tears—over the loss of “his own youth.”
While in the bar with Tommy, Dick is visited by a second ghost—the ghost of Abe North. In a cavalier discussion, Tommy reveals that the witty alcoholic composer-who-no-longer-composes has been beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. Exhibiting the same indifference to victims of violence that Dick and Nicole had shown earlier, Tommy and his friend argue whether it was the Racquet Club or the Harvard Club to which the beaten Abe crawled with his final breaths.
Dick’s holiday is briefly interrupted when he must travel to America to bury his father. Staring at the familiar names in the family plot, Dick realizes he “had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back,” his decade abroad having left him without a home or a country.
On the ship back to Europe, Dick runs into Albert McKisco, the third ghost from the Villa Diana dinner. While in 1925 McKisco was a pretentious young man of letters, he has achieved wealth and fame as a novelist on a foundation of “self-respect.” By contrast, Dick’s halfhearted return to his profession by means of his wife’s money has left him feeling “swallowed up like a gigolo.”
Upon arriving in Rome, at the luxurious Hotel Quirinale, Dick is visited by the fourth and final ghost, Rosemary Hoyt—the young woman who had adored him just a few years before. At long last, the two consummate their relationship, but the act of union leaves Dick with a sense of loss rather than attainment. A mutual acquaintance points out that Rosemary is now “a woman of the world.” The acquaintance means this in the salacious sense, but Rosemary has, in fact, become a woman of the world. Like McKisco, she has used the intervening years to advance her career and her fame, and while in Rome, she has phone calls, professional appointments, and social engagements that take priority over her former infatuation. Thus, one by one, the ghosts of Dick’s past show him all that he has not become: not a man of courage, not a professional success, not a faithful husband, not an irresistible lover. Or to put it more simply, in the parlance of the times, not a man.
Shaken, Dick goes on a bender, drinking heavily in a basement cabaret. The music is now in the foreground, but it is “a listless band” playing the exaggerated strains of the tango. Where Dick once seemed the charming personification of cosmopolitanism, he now exhibits a casual racism, attacking the British and Italian people with sweeping, ugly assessments. Boorishly, he elbows his way into someone else’s date, dances with the young woman drunkenly, then is shocked when she suddenly disappears.
Having long benefited from the help of anonymous intermediaries, Dick has become condescending in their company. Calling over the Negro bandleader, Dick quickly offends him in an argument over money. Slurring his words, he stumbles into the night and gets into another row over money, this time with a group of taxi drivers. They all go to a police station to resolve the dispute, where Dick has one last ill-fated encounter with the servile class, punching a “leering” observer who turns out to be a plainclothes lieutenant. At long last, the violence that Dick has been accustomed to witnessing with a cavalier indifference, visits itself upon him in full fury. Sitting in a prison cell with a broken nose, cracked ribs, and a closed eye, Dick has no choice but to pursue a final emasculating act: asking his wife’s sister to bail him out. The great unraveling has begun, and in the pages that follow the finely colored threads of Dick’s tapestry will be pulled apart without remedy or recourse.
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For all its poetic beauty and mythic resonance, The Great Gatsby is fundamentally a novel of the imagination—a tidy parable that has been crafted with great care and economy. By contrast, Tender Is the Night is a novel of experience. While exhibiting Fitzgerald’s prodigious talents—his elegant writing, his command of human psychology, and his nuanced sense of society—Tender is also sprawling, complicated, chaotic, and very, very personal. It is no coincidence that the events in the book begin just two months after Gatsby was published. In Tender we find not how Fitzgerald imagines the world might be, but how he experienced it firsthand. I suspect that even those unfamiliar with the details of Fitzgerald’s biography can sense a moral immediacy. To watch in slow motion as Dick Diver’s alluring liberties betray him, we feel the pain of his diminishment at every step, and we leave his story with a greater reverence for the quotidian responsibilities that bind us more closely to life.
—Amor Towles