* This piece was commissioned by The American Scholar for their Rereading series. They responded to the draft I sent in by asking if I could make it more personal, so some of what’s here is me being obedient, not self-indulgent!
It was The Great Gatsby we were “doing” for A-levels, not Tender Is the Night, but my English teacher got me to read it anyway. I was seventeen and remembered practically nothing about it—but I never quite forgot it.
This, it turns out, is a not uncommon reaction, or at least a variant of a fairly common one. Putting into practice an idea he’d “got from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger,” Fitzgerald believed that “the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind.” He was responding to some surly comments about Tender from Hemingway, who, as if succumbing to exactly these “lingering after-effects,” later told Max Perkins of a “strange thing” about Fitzgerald, namely, that “in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better.” John Updike bounces this kind of response back into the works themselves. “So often in Fitzgerald,” he writes, “we have only the afterglow of a dream to see by.”
I don’t remember when I read Tender for the second time. Even the note scribbled in the front of my Penguin edition is uncertain: “Read 2, 3 times (?) before this, Paris, April/May 92.” I had gone to Paris in 1991 to write a novel that, I hoped, was going to be a contemporary version of Tender Is the Night, so the afterglow of those undated rereadings was, evidently, still strong. Appropriately enough, I made little progress with this novel and, after a visit to the battlefields of northern France, abandoned it in favor of a book about the Great War. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that, when I reread Tender in the spring of 1992, it seemed a book saturated in the aftermath of the First World War or—as Fitzgerald himself put it—“the broken universe of the war’s ending.”
“This Western front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time,” Dick Diver explains during a visit to the battlefields of the Western Front in 1925. “This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation between the classes.” That’s the passage that always gets quoted, but the book is dominated throughout by what Dick terms, in a “half-ironic phrase: Non-combatant’s shell-shock.” The battlefields of northern France, where, as Dick explains, the dead lay “like a million bloody rugs,” are twinned, through this image, with the Riviera and “its bright tan prayer rug of a beach.”
Having got the Great War out of my system, I did eventually write my Paris novel, but I did not actually read Tender again until last week, when I did so specifically to write this piece. The book I encountered this time around was radically different from the one I had read before. Quite literally: up until then I had always read the version reorganized by Fitzgerald, edited by Malcolm Cowley, and first published in 1951. This time I read the original version, beginning not with Dick encountering the wounded on his way to Zurich but with Rosemary’s first glimpse of the Divers on the French Riviera.
From Hemingway on, Fitzgerald’s fellow writers have felt free to be smugly superior about his achievements. In the most wonderfully snobby aside of all, E. M. Cioran remarks on what seems “an incomprehensible thing to me: T. S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald that he had read The Great Gatsby three times!” After watching the movie of Tender—“a very good film of a rather poor book”—Evelyn Waugh concluded, ambivalently, that “the enormously expensive apparatus of the film studio can produce nothing as valuable as can one half-tipsy Yank with a typewriter.” For Gore Vidal, “very little” of what the “barely literate” Fitzgerald wrote “has any great value as literature.”
On this latest rereading I feared, at first, that he was right. In places the writing in these early pages is strikingly inept, as when Rosemary, feeling the “impactive scrutiny” of strangers on the beach, notices the “brash navel” and “facetious whiskers” of a man with a monocle. It all felt like someone trying to make his writing interesting—what Nick Carraway calls “a strained counterfeit of perfect ease”—and succeeding only in drawing attention to its failing. Writing often works best when you are oblivious to it, when you respond to its effects without being conscious of how they are achieved. And so it was here. After that initially uncomfortable period of settling in, I fell under Fitzgerald’s tender spell as subtly as Dick’s guests fall under their host’s. His gift for making people believe in the world he creates while “leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done” is of a piece with the effect—more accurately, the lingering aftereffect—of Tender itself. Other incidental observations hint at this quality of evocative reverberation. Utterly infatuated, Rosemary catches only the gist of Dick’s sentences and supplies “the rest from her unconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.”
It is often thought that Fitzgerald was as besotted by elegance and the wealth on which it is predicated as the teenage Rosemary is by Dick. This is such a distorting simplification of an author who read Marx and conceived of Dick as “a man like myself,” “a communist-liberal-idealist, a moralist in revolt,” that one wonders at its capacity to persist. In a letter of 1938 Fitzgerald wrote, “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” He was the most materialist of romantics, the most romantic of materialists. As representatives of the “furthermost evolution of a class,” the Divers incarnate a way of life that, in its apparent transcendence of all material concerns, is enviably idyllic. But Fitzgerald was one of the first writers to grasp the enervating horror of infinite leisure (in Jane Austen it is simply assumed). Given limitless time and freedom, everything, as Dick eventually blurts out at Mary North, comes to seem “damned dull.” Realizing the extent to which Nicole’s immense wealth serves “to belittle his own work,” Dick sits “listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time.” Not the time of striking hours but blank, undifferentiated time. In this eternity of leisure it is inevitable that Dick, though conscious that he has “lost himself,” cannot “tell the hour when, or the day or the week, or the month or the year.”
About the larger system of global degradation on which this leisure and its attendant virtues of poise and elegance depend, Fitzgerald is, by contrast, explicit and exact: for Nicole’s sake, “girls canned tomatoes in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole.” Poise itself is thereby tainted by the exploitation that finances its cultivation.
If poise and degradation are inescapably entwined then so too—as in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” from which Fitzgerald took his title—are rapture and despondency, celebration and lament. Early on in the novel Nicole observes one of Dick’s “most characteristic moods,” “the excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by his own form of melancholy, which he never displayed but at which she guessed.” From this cocktail of entangled emotions emerges what Philip Larkin—in “For Sidney Bechet,” another, very different elegy for his own idea of the jazz age—calls the “long-haired grief and scored pity” of the book. Writing it demanded from Fitzgerald a willingness to believe again in every promise of happiness that had been broken by his life.
If the precise trajectory of Dick’s failure becomes more difficult to trace with every rereading, this is a tribute to the book’s subtlety rather than an indication of a lack. Dick’s disintegration is, of course, a prism refracting Fitzgerald’s own. Indeed, the three-way relation between the fictional world Fitzgerald created, the Fitzgeralds as they actually were, and the synthetic myth of the Fitzgeralds that emerged from this interrelation is as central to the enduring popularity of Fitzgerald’s work as it is to the dissenting view that his popularity is based on meager literary merit. Rather than disentangling these strands, consider, for a moment, just how intimately they are entwined.
While they are not portraits of Sara and Gerald Murphy, Nicole and Dick are partly derived from them (Hemingway’s initial objections to the book had primarily to do with this). At the same time, as John O’Hara pointed out, “sooner or later his characters always come back to being Fitzgerald characters in a Fitzgerald world.… Dick Diver ended up as a tall Fitzgerald.” This protean connection between the lived and the fictive is suggested by Rebecca West’s response to a request for her remembered impressions of Zelda.
West had met the Fitzgeralds on her first visit to New York in 1923–24 and again on the Riviera in 1926. Zelda, West wrote in 1963, “was very plain”: “She was standing with her back to me, and her hair was quite lovely, it glistened like a child’s. Her face had a certain craggy homeliness. There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in Géricault’s pictures of the insane.” As West continued to mull over the past, a “very unpleasant memory” came to mind of how Zelda
had flapped her arms and looked very uncouth as she talked about her ballet ambitions. The odd thing to me always was that Scott Fitzgerald… should have liked someone who was so inelegant. But she was not at all unlikeable. There was something very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.
Irrespective of the physical accuracy of West’s description of Zelda, this seems to me the single most penetrating insight we have—not into Fitzgerald but into his art (especially if we bear in mind an earlier occasion when West, in precisely the style advocated by Fitzgerald, commented on “the after-image” of Zelda’s face). It reveals the humming circuitry of an artist’s imaginative life. In late 1935 Gerald Murphy conceded to Fitzgerald “that what you said in Tender Is the Night was true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme any beauty.” During her first encounters with Dick, Rosemary is aware of “an act of creation different from any she had known”; “the intensely calculated perfection” of the Villa Diana becomes evident “through such minute failures as the chance apparition of a maid in the background or the perversity of a cork.” West’s incidental X-ray reveals the fundamental urge—the creative ontology of the writer—behind these variously arranged contrivings. If Fitzgerald’s fascination with wealth derived in part from being, as he insisted, “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school,” then it is not surprising to find that elegance and beauty share a similar proximity to plainness and inelegance. In comparable style, his famous lyrical flourishes work best when they are earthed in the actual and immediate. To make the same point in terms of the symbolic geography of The Great Gatsby, the significance of Gatsby’s mansion lies not simply in its “meretricious beauty” but in its tragic proximity to the ash heaps of Wilson’s garage. By the time of Tender Is the Night this kind of topographic scheme has been subtly dissolved, psychologically internalized. The lyrical and beautiful are constantly flickering into the abject and desolate.
At this point I need to go back to the novel I went to Paris to write. Taking an aspect of Tender and adapting it for my own needs, I wanted to write a book about a failure that also depicted an idyllic period in the life of that failure—but I kept failing to write it. Asked if I am disciplined in my working habits, I always respond that I am actively hostile to the idea of writers lashing themselves to their desks for six hours a day, irrespective of how they feel. I write when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t. My inability to make any progress with my Paris novel, however, did make me suspect that I had become too self-indulgent, too dissolute in my ways. Perhaps I had been seduced by the version of creativity personified by the junkie saxophonist Art Pepper, who claimed he “never studied, never practiced.… All I had to do was reach for it.” I kept telling myself that the material I was dealing with was too personal, that I wasn’t ready to face it, but I also worried that I simply lacked self-discipline. Failure to write the book gave rise to a less specific sense of failure, so generalized, in fact, that it became part of my life. And then, quite suddenly, without any conscious effort, I began writing the book. It came fairly easily and, I realized quickly, the delay in writing the book—the earlier failure to write it—became an active part in its composition. All sorts of things that had happened in the interim found their place in the book, the most important of which were my experiences with MDMA, or Ecstasy.
Fitzgerald, as we all know, was an alcoholic; booze flows like a river through Tender. At that time there was a glamour and promise about drinking that has long since dissipated. In a contemporary context such glamour and promise could only be provided by drugs, and so, naturally, the characters in my Paris Trance all take E.
On Rosemary’s first evening at the Divers’ the guests gather for dinner: “They had been at table half an hour and a perceptible change had set in—person by person had given up something, a preoccupation, an anxiety, a suspicion, and now they were only their best selves and the Divers’ guests.” This is followed by one of the most famous scenes in the book:
There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And, as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisko were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand.… Just for a moment they seemed to speak to everyone at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree.
Of the many descriptions in contemporary literature of people coming up on E, none surpasses this. Certain details in Tender—the way Dick is always wearing gloves, or carrying a cane—tie it too closely to the costume drama of the jazz age in which it is set, but scenes like this show its opposite, timeless quality.
Alcohol befuddles and eventually destroys; over time Ecstasy diminishes the user’s capacity to enjoy exactly the feelings taking it initially releases. The flood of serotonin induced by Ecstasy leads, ultimately, to a radical depletion of serotonin. It is as if there is a certain, finite quantity of happiness that Ecstasy can lead one to use up quickly. Luke, the central character in my book, blows a lifetime’s happiness in a single yearlong splurge. By any normal reckoning he is a failure, but I wanted also to suggest that, in failing, Luke was somehow being true to his destiny. My faith in this notion was strengthened when I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, more exactly when I read the passage from Jung’s “The Development of Personality” that is quoted in the book:
The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing.… He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.… The only meaningful life… is… a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own peculiar law.… To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being… he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.
This passage of Jung’s was in turn obviously derived from Nietzsche, specifically from the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” one of the Untimely Meditations. Sometimes the very pervasiveness of an influence makes it difficult to trace. It is quite possible that my own inkling that an individual’s failure might not derive solely from an inability to realize his potential but, on the contrary, from an ability to access a deeper level of that potential was nurtured by prolonged exposure to Nietzsche’s thought. By the same token, the germ of the idea might also have come from those early, dimly remembered readings of Tender Is the Night. On the other hand again, perhaps it was because the germ of this idea was latent in me that I was so susceptible to Tender in the first place and so prone, subsequently, to regard Dick in this somewhat peculiar light.
Certainly now, in the wake of having written a book that was both a version of Tender and an attempt to dramatize this theory of failure/destiny, I see what happens to Dick almost as the opposite of a collapse: a standing firm, an assertion rather than a weakening of will. This is why Dick’s failure is accompanied by the affirming sense that he is not falling short of but living up to his destiny, fulfilling it. E. M. Cioran got as close as anyone to the mysterious heart of Tender when he said of the Fitzgeralds’ time in Europe—“seven years of waste and tragedy,” as Fitzgerald himself termed it—that in this time “they indulged every extravagance, as though haunted by a secret desire to exhaust themselves.” Elsewhere, without even referring to Fitzgerald, Cioran writes that “the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest… will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”
On a more mundane level Dick is like millions of people who end up settling for a lot less than they had once promised. But he is also, far more unusually, someone who seeks out his “intricate destiny” despite the huge detour of his early success. This is especially arduous since, unlike Nicole, who contains “in herself her own doom,” Dick, according to Fitzgerald’s notes, is “a superman in possibilities.” He has an array of talents and opportunities at his disposal, talents that must, to rephrase things only slightly, be disposed of. First he has to allow his early ambitions to be a good psychiatrist—“maybe to be the greatest one that ever lived”—to dissipate amid the affluence of the world to which Nicole’s wealth grants him access. But here too his “fine personality” and “great personal charm” (Fitzgerald’s notes again) ensure that he becomes a virtual Prospero of the Riviera. To go from here to the small town where he ends up will require not a dissipation but a massive assertion of will. Ostensibly it might be a lack of strength that leads him to squander his talents, but the further movement into charmless drunkenness and bigotry, brawling and self-ostracism, is as much a rising to the surface of Jung’s “daemon” as it is a descent. The belated consummation of his affair with Rosemary is less an act of faithlessness to Nicole than of fidelity to a long-buried urge to shatter his life:
“We can’t go on like this,” Nicole suggested. “Or can we?—what do you think?” Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, “Some of the time I think it’s my fault—I’ve ruined you.”
“So I’m ruined, am I?” he inquired pleasantly.
“I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.”
She trembled at criticizing him in these broad terms—but his enlarging silence frightened her even more. She guessed that something was developing behind the silence, behind the hard, blue eyes.… It was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface.
A few pages later, Dick’s voice has become “serene” and his face shows “none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even detached.” And then, as if to hint, delicately, at the extent of Dick’s achievement, Fitzgerald grants him a kind of lyrical—almost a signature—blessing: “He turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over Africa.”
In this light, the episode of supreme humiliation—when he fails to perform a gymnastic feat that he would have “done with ease only two years ago”—is actually a definitive triumph. Word has already got around that “Dick is no longer a serious man,” and as if to validate such rumors, he inflicts a kind of tragic slapstick on himself. Three times he tries—even though on the third attempt he “couldn’t have lifted a paper doll”—and three times he fails to get up, his impotence made embarrassingly public. From this point on—Nicole regards him with “contempt,” “everything he did annoyed her now”—there is nothing to endear him to anyone. No one stands in his way. He is free, free at last, to realize his true and wretched destiny.
2001
* This piece was commissioned by The American Scholar for their Rereading series. They responded to the draft I sent in by asking if I could make it more personal, so some of what’s here is me being obedient, not self-indulgent!