The Decline And Fall-F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is The Night”(1934)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Lance Lawrence

Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1934

Every amateur writer, every young writer looking to make a breakthrough, and every avid reader always is confronted when reading the novels of famous authors like the one under review here F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night with wonder about how much of a story’s plotline is based on the author’s vivid imagination and how much on autobiographical or self-reference. As for the subject matter-mental illness, alcoholism, financial independence and the decline of one’s professional energies- in Fitzgerald’s book for once there is no need for such guesswork because during the period just before sitting down to write this well-written and vividly described book his wife had been hospitalized for some mental disorder, he was hustling like seven dervishes to raise cash, and was letting booze get the best of him (which in the end would contribute mightily to his early death a few years later). This in any case is his last completed novel (The Last Tycoon was unfinished) and while I personally rank The Great Gatsby as his greatest novel this one ranks just a step or two below that classic. (Fitzgerald himself ranked this one as his greatest effort although I don’t what he based that ranking on).             

As already noted above this story line, set up as a series of flashbacks and flash forwards over “three books,” is the story of the rise and fall of one Dick Diver from the heights of his profession as a up and coming young psychiatrist to, not surprisingly, a middle aged man sunk in a downward rut and sunk in the depths of booze before the end when he winds up in some upstate backwater doing yeoman’s work as a country doctor. It is also the story, maybe better a cautionary tale, about the pitfalls of bedding and marrying one of your patients because that is what he does with the other main character his initially mentally fragile wife, Nicole Diver nee Warren (that nee is important since she came from serious robber baron money and Dick was lucky to have carfare on his own hook).            

Dick and Nicole “meet” in a European sanatorium where Nicole has been deposited by her father after many unsuccessful attempts to cure her affliction elsewhere (there is a strong suggestion of incest as the cause). In the process of “curing” Nicole they fall in love and are married. This gives Dick for a time anyway room to pursue his budding career as a psychiatrist dealing with obscure mental illnesses. But it also creates tensions when it came to financial matters as Dick wanted some independence and of course Nicole was used to having plenty of dough. Created tensions as well when Nicole would for a long while during their marriage and parenthood have periodic relapses.

Most of the story takes place in European settings, mainly France, since as was the vogue in the Jazz Age by the alienated post-World War I intelligentsia that is where they went to get away from low-rent grasping America. A lot of the power of this novel is centered on the isolated existence that these ex-pats’ live as they hunker down amount themselves with romances, liaisons and wasted time. Dick’s life though as he approaches middle age is spiced up by an interest in a young starlet, Rosemary, who has come to Europe with her mother for the grand tour. This affair will end badly as the pair part after a long cat and mouse playing and as Rosemary rises in the film world and Dick succumbs to his own hubris (and alcohol, okay). Worse this affair affected Nicole, led to a few of her relapses.  In the end as Dick declined Nicole got stronger, got strong enough to have an affair with one of the men in their circle and eventually divorced Dick as he stumbles downhill and married him (reminding me of the flow of Gide’s The Immoralist where the wife declines after saving the getting stronger life of her self-absorbed husband).          

The beauty of this novel is not so much in the now fairly conventional story line but in the vivid descriptions of the characters, of the landscape, hell, like his friend Hemingway, of the food and of his use of metaphor that is nothing less than astounding. Not Gatsby, no question, since that literary effort summed up an age in one person is but a very good description of the rise and fall of a man of that same Jazz Age. Read this one, heck, read all of Fitzgerald.