Tender Is the Night

Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
read: circa 2005
Modern Library #28, Guardian 1000 Novels

Like A Farewell to Arms, Tender Is the Night is a book I was supposed to read for my English class in college but did not until years later.  I read it in two or three days while sailing with my aunt and uncle and cousins along the coast of Maine.  It was a devastating book to read in that short a time, and I walked around for hours after finishing it with a profound sense of loss.  The story is heartbreaking and Fitzgerald renders it beautifully.  Nobody writes better prose than Fitzgerald; it's simultaneously readable and poetic.

It was the empathy that amazed me most.  Dick and Nicole Diver are married, and Dick is pursuing an affair with young Rosemary Hoyt, yet all three are sympathetic characters.  I'm not a huge fan of novels running out-of-sequence, but here it works perfectly.  The first third of the book, written in third-person but largely focusing on Rosemary, gives us the perspective to want what Rosemary wants: to get together with Dick despite his marriage.  The Divers' relationship seems rocky and Nicole seems odd; wouldn't Dick be so much happier with a starlet like Rosemary?  But the second third is a flashback to how Dick and Nicole got together in the first place, and we see how special their courtship was and how much they were both willing to sacrifice to be together.  The organization serves to make the reader feel for all the characters in the story.

I later read that this was a happy accident.  Fitzgerald had intended Tender Is the Night to expose the decadence of expatriate life on the French Riviera.  But partway through writing that story, his wife Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown.  He kept most of what he had written, leaving it as the first part of the story, but for the remainder he shift gears to something more personal.  The sequencing was a product of this disjointed style, not a deliberate design, and Fitzgerald left notes to the effect that the story should be re-arranged to read chronologically.  How much do his author's intentions matter?  Ultimately he wrote it the way he write it; if he didn't write it out-of-sequence for the same reason I like it out-of-sequence, does it make a difference?

The sense I have just reading through the Wikipedia entry on Tender Is the Night is that Fitzgerald was a deeply troubled individual.  Apart from his wife's nervous breakdown, Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism.  He died six years after Tender Is the Night was published; it was the last novel he finished.  The tragedy in his life is mirrored in Dick Diver's disintegration over the final third of the novel.  That makes reading Tender Is the Night a unique and moving experience; it starts as one kind of book and as Fitzgerald's personal demons become more prevalent it becomes a different sort of book.  It is one of my favorite novels ever.