Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Kisses Of All The Lost Youth Of The World

Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Tender Is the Night

	Tender Is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald Scribner, 1995 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 138 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Kisses Of All The Lost Youth Of The World

Why does Dick and Nicole's marriage disintigrate? Because Dick is haunted by his loss of integrity for marrying Nicole as much for love as for money? Because Dick, above all else, needed to be needed, and as Nicole's mental health improves after his many years of care and attention, he is no longer needed as much? As evidenced by his post-divorce aimlessness and professional failure, was Nicole his only true life's work? And the descent into alcoholism and Dick's preoccupation with Rosemary, the "other woman" - why?

After much reflection I concluded that, not only did all of the foregoing factors contribute, but another factor exists, a great overarching truth for which neither Dick nor Nicole are responsible, and which Fitzgerald so delicately articulates. That truth is that we simply get older, and as youth recedes, so does starry-eyed optimism. A man and a woman become familiar to one another; their marriage routine. And a man like Dick, who thrives on attention and excitement, becomes trapped and miserable in the commonplace. He self-medicates through drink and reaffirms a flattering sexual self-image through the attention of a much younger, adoring woman, even if he eventually loses her, too. Ultimately, Dick is a caged animal who must have out - for what uncertain destiny is beside the point.

TENDER IS THE NIGHT is, perhaps, the most psychologically complex novel I have ever read. Fitzgerald captures the ephemeral ebb and flow of human emotion within the context of the closed circle of intimacy with stunning accuracy, realism, and beauty. Apart from the immediate plot concerning Dick and Nicole, TENDER IS THE NIGHT is also a vivid portrayal of Fitzgerald's generation and strata of society abroad in the 1920s. In this way it is similar to Flaubert's SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION: both are love stories set against backgrounds of social upheaval wrought by a new prosperity, replete with hustlers, strivers, and posers, all on the make.

In an Amazon review of James Joyce's ULYSSES a few years ago, I criticized Fitzgerald's work for being "dated". Well, it is; and TENDER IS THE NIGHT is, in many ways, dated; but it was a product of its time, and it is easy to be critical about a preceding generation's values, now discredited. That said, however, Fitzgerald's preoccupation with wealth and class nevertheless borders on the pathological. And, unless it is merely to illustrate his characters' limitations, his tiresome Anglophilia and alarming antipathy toward (of all people!) the Italians is pure racism. I often found myself thinking that Fitzgerald was a far better writer than his characters deserved.

Insofar as lanuage, vocabulary and style, TENDER IS THE NIGHT is demanding. Read it slowly and re-read passages you fail to fully absorb on the first go-round. Fitzgerald's vocabulary is sophisticated, so use a dictionary. Finally, this book is ethereal: it is poetry and must be approached as such.

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The Voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In many ways this books is less complicated and easier to understand if we go back and look at Fitzgerald's own notes that he recorded in his famous ledger pror to writing the novel. The biographer Mathew Bruccoli does an excellent job of pulling together many of the details surrounding the life and the works of Fitzgerald (FSF).

The present novel was written more thatn 10 years after his breakthrough novel "This Side of Paradise." His marriage had soured, his wife Zelda was hosplitized with mental ilness, and he was living in Baltimore. He needed a novel to demonstrate that he was still a force and he wrote this two part book with the time flashback as that vehicle.

The novel opens in 1925, set on the Riviera, and is narrated by a young actress Rosemary who deveops and attraction to a married Dick Diver. In his notes, he says that Dick looks like him, FSF; Dick's wife looks like Marlene Dietrich; Rosemary looks like the young actress Lois Moran. He had met the latter in Hollywood while screenwriting and had developed an attachment to her. He was 30 while Moran was just 18, ages similar to Dick and Rosemary in the novel. Although nothing happened, this caused quite a stir with his real wife Zelda who started a fire in their apartment in protest. The Dick Diver character is based on a Baltimore doctor that was treating FSF for his alcoholism. Those are the people that create a framework for the novel.

The novel reflects the complexities of FSF's own life, the failure of his marriage, his driking, the decline of his career, and his attraction to, or distraction by, Lois Moran.

The novel is divided into two parts. Part I opens on a beach on the Riviera in 1925 and describes the chance meeting between the Divers (a married couple Dick and Nicole) and the young actress Rosemary. She is attracted to Dick, but nothing happens. In part II, the story re-starts in 1917 without Rosemary and we trace the meeting and marriage of the Diver couple. One reson for the two parts is to introduce the time fahsback, that FSF thought would make the novel a lot more sophisticated, and it would quiet down some of his critics that thought that his writing ideas were too simple.

Rosemary's role is primarily to throw the weak Dick off his marriage, get him frustrated since they never consumate, make him think of other women, so he starts to have these side affairs and ruin his marriage, independent of whether or not she comes back into the story.

The core of the story is about a weak man distracted by drink and women, as perhaps FSF was as well. In real life his wife never recovers from her mental illness, and died in a fire in a home in the early 1940s.

The story is a bit backwards compared to FSF's real life. In real life FSF went into seclusion on the Riviera to finish Gatsby. Zelda had the affair, not him, while he was writing. So it is a slight role reversal here. Her affair opened the door I suppose for him to have an affiar, and since he went to Hollywood often as a screen writer, there might have been something going on there but probably not with the original distraction, Lois.

"Tender is the Night" from Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale". This is a poem that wouldmake FSF cry, every time he read it.

Excellent novel, and highly recommend.

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I LIKED IT AS MUCH AS I REMEMBERED

I hadn't read Tender Is the Night for at least a dozen years. Maybe more. Though I thought of it as one of my favorite books, I realized when I began re-reading it that I had forgotten much of the story. The one thing that was still fresh in my mind was the sense of tragedy I associated with Dick. By that I mean, I remembered him as a tragic figure. What was the source - arrogance, impatience, fatigue, attraction to money, alcohol? All of those? None of them? I'm not sure. I am sure that Dick is an intensely personal representation of Fitzgerald himself. Tommy Barban be damned. He's a charlatan. If nothing else, I can only hope Nicole realized how much she lost when she lost Dick.

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Great book

I loved this book, as I do all of Fitzgerald's works, especially "The Great Gatsby." You can't go wrong with any of his books.The beauty of this book is that Fitzgerald's elegant prose flows so nicely into the story being told. It is wonderfully written, but not distractinly so. Five stars for a perfect book.

Fitzgerald's Elegy to Youth

F. Scott fans, sorry to disappoint, but I can't regard this book as much more than a semi-autobiographical paean to rich and hollow youth, graced redeemingly here and there by the deft lyrical touch.-But even the trumpeted writing in this book is mostly Princeton Sophomoric- Every single character, not just the primary ones, is as beautiful as he or she is hollow. One gets the feeling, after a while, that one is watching one of those mindless beach films of the early sixties---It may be true that Fitzgerald cried every time he read Keats's Ode to A Nightingale, from which Fitzgerald gets his title for the book, but Dick Diver, so obviously Fitzgerald's alter ego, is, in so many passages casually relating his omnipotence over women, and in one explicitly stating the similitude (p. 258 in my edition) much more a Byron figure than the greater poet.

Life in this world seems to end at 29, where Nicole leaves our hero in the last few pages.-The whole to do about Fitzgerald's/Diver's alcoholism as an excuse for the book's banality just won't do.- Fitzgerald made the excuse to his editor that he wrote the whole of Section III while tight as an owl-And so what, Scott? - Hemingway was an alcoholic and suicide. Faulkner died of the DT's in a sanatorium near his home in Mississippi Jack London died at 40 of alcoholism and Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neil, and Hart Crane and Carson McCullers and.....and it's really hard to think of a major American writer of Scott's era that didn't succumb to the perils of drink. This did not stop any from writing mature works that dealt powerfully with the human condition, not just the rich and beautiful. ---The one exception seems to be Ezra Pound, who merely went mad and spent most of his time broadcasting Fascist propaganda for Mussolini during WWII.

The book's credo might well be summarised by Abe North, who disappears early in the work, foreshadowing Dick's later demise, asseverating before his own alcoholic death: "When you're older, you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love."

As an alternative to this rather cold and young book, I would recommend either Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and The Damned, written when he WAS young and his lyrical powers, quite frankly, were at their height and allowed him to pull it off. Or, for a truly great lyrical book, probably the best of Fitzgerald's generation, Thomas Wolfe's (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe) Look Homeward Angel...Not a witless bathing beauty from first page to last.. .

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