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I. General
When I was in Florence this summer, a store owner asked me if I’d seen the previous evening’s sunset. I told him that I had to which he responded: “The pink and red of the clouds made you feel like something magical was happening.”
How many Americans, at any educational level, would describe a sunset that way?
There seems to be a cultural difference in Europe that encourages eloquence, even in those who are not fluent. They put a greater emphasis on expressing emotion and beauty through language not by being pedantic, but by taking more of an interest in the words that they choose. When cultures don’t do that, we get the fast-foodification of English where everything—from sex to Michelin Star meals—is described as “sick,” “beat,” or “fire.”
Tender is the Night is an antidote to this disease: it is closer to poetry than prose and every page inspires you to become more lyrical. Fitzgerald’s writing is ornate and beautiful and, beyond its style, the book naturally rehabilitates the romantic spirit that has gone missing in modernity.
The novel is autobiographical and follows the relationships between Dick Diver (based on F. Scott Fitzgerald); his wife, Nicole Diver (based on Zelda Fitzgerald); and an up-and-coming actress, Rosemary Hoyt (based on Lois Moran). There are also clear references to other ex-pat writers of the Lost Generation:
"Going home?"
"Home? I have no home. I am going to a war."
"What war?"
"What war? Any war. I haven't seen a paper lately but I suppose there's a war—there always is."
In the following sections, I’ve chosen some of my favorite passages from the book to support my analysis of the themes of money; youth and deterioration; attractive masculinity; and romance. In the last two sections, you’ll find a collection of dialogue and beautiful language that I couldn’t place anywhere else.
Note: there are some spoilers below. This isn’t a heavily plot-driven book, but if you’re sensitive to reveals (as I am) you might want to hold off until after you read it.
II. Money
Money is a recurring theme in many of Fitzgerald’s books because it played an outsized role in his life. He grew up poor and his relationship with his first love, Ginerva King, was disallowed because of their different social statuses. King’s father put it succinctly when he said “poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.” This tragedy was the inspiration for Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald directly said:
The whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.
In Tender is the Night, Nicole is the rich girl who uses her money to control Dick:
Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods and money. The inception of the idea of the cliff villa which they had elaborated as a fantasy one day was a typical example of the forces divorcing them from the first simple arrangements in Zurich.
— from Book II, Chapter XII
Taken autobiographically, it can be understood that even though Fitzgerald was the breadwinner, he felt that his wife was the one in control of the finances, perhaps because of her demands for a lavish lifestyle. He goes as far as to directly recreate Hemingway’s analogy of him “whoring” by publishing mediocre short stories (emphasis mine):
Watching his father's struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security—he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.
— from Book II, Chapter XVIII
Given that Fitzgerald was under mounting financial stress as he wrote this book—to the point where he was borrowing money from his agent—in addition to his recurring obsession with money, it should come as no surprise that it plays a massive role in this story.
III. Youth & Deterioration
Unlike the rest of the cast who are full of complexities and pains, Rosemary is simplified so that she can serve as a symbol of youth. Fitzgerald accomplishes this by giving us very little insight into her depths—if she has any—and by writing her as an actress who is always performing. By rendering her as a concept, he points to the common male attraction for young women that is contrasted from the female attraction to other qualities such as confidence and charm.
In the following passage, Fitzgerald uses his words like a director’s camera—taking us from the sea to the hotel to a close-up of the mother to a longer close-up of her daughter—to introduce us to the setting and two central characters. He explicitly contrasts Rosemary with aging women by first describing her mother’s fading prettiness before describing Rosemary’s attractive, youthful vivaciousness:
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse's Hotel. The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one's eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
— from Book I, Chapter I
Later, he illustrates that it was also Nicole’s youth that attracted Dick:
Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
— from Book II, Chapter V
And he writes of her fears of fading beauty:
For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.
— from Book II, Chapter XIV
Fitzgerald also wrote Rosemary as an actress so that he could successfully portray the unattractive inexperience and superficiality of younger women, which renders her a fleeting object of desire rather than a viable alternative to Nicole. She is devoid of real experience so she is constantly choosing from lines that she thinks would fit and mimicking behaviors that she’s heard about (emphasis mine):
But the space between heaven and earth had cooled his mind, destroyed the impulsiveness that had led him to bring her here, and made him aware of the too obvious appeal, the struggle with an unrehearsed scene and unfamiliar words.
— from Book I, Chapter VIII
And he specifically comments on the lack of depth that makes her uninteresting:
the beauty of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator
— from Book I, Chapter XXIV
But Dick’s desire for Rosemary goes far beyond romance: he is deteriorating rather than aging and he longs for time passed. He squanders his own potential, which Fitzgerald makes a point of highlighting in Book I as well as Book II:
Most of us have a favorite, a heroic period, in our lives and that [when he was 26] was Dick Diver's.
— from Book II, Chapter I
"I've only got one, Franz, and that's to be a good psychologist—maybe to be the greatest one that ever lived."
— from Book II, Chapter IV
But as the book progresses, everything falls apart and he explicitly yearns for years past:
The column marched slowly with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a forgotten sorrow. The faces were only formally sad but Dick's lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe's death, and his own youth of ten years ago.
— from Book II, Chapter XVII
And eventually realizes that he can only find beauty in others who have their lives ahead of them:
He was not young any more with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself, so he wanted to remember them [his children] well.
— from Book III, Chapter XII
Fitzgerald captures Dick’s regression by first building Dick up as a marvelously charming character; then showing us his youthful ideals; and finally showing us how everything spins out of control. Book II and III capture these last segments by moving from destruction to destruction with an ever-increasing speed. As the book comes to a close, we’re left with powerful images on the same beach where he’d started off so gracefully:
When, with a last wrenching effort of his back, Dick stood upright, the board slid sidewise and the pair toppled into the sea.
— from Book III, Chapter VII
"I must go," he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more—his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.
— from Book III, Chapter XII
A superficial analysis of his fall indicates that Nicole, in addition to alcohol, was a major factor in his fall from grace; but at its core was his own selfish desire to be loved, which was part of the reason that he was attractive in the first place:
An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him: he showed them fragments of gaiety; tentatively he bought them wine, with pleasure saw them begin to regain their proper egotism.
— from Book II, Chapter XIX
Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.
— from Book III, Chapter X
And Fitzgerald shows that he charmed because he could, impersonally, and that much of it is a big, funny game to him (emphasis mine):
"You once liked me, didn't you?" he asked.
"Liked you—I loved you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking—"
"There has always been something between you and me."
She bit eagerly. "Has there, Dick?"
"Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them." But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn't keep it up much longer.
IV. Attractive Masculinity
Given modernity’s proclivity for pillorying men, it’s refreshing to read about Dick’s attractive masculinity at the beginning of the novel. After showing us that attraction often flows from men to women disproportionately through beauty and vitality, the author uses the narrator’s voice to portray how it flows from women to men via Dick’s exhibitions of strength, competence, confidence, and charm:
For a moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything.
— from Book I, Chapter VI
She adored him for saving her—disasters that could have attended upon the event had passed in prophecy through her mind; and she had listened in wild worship to his strong, sure, polite voice making it all right.
— from Book I, Chapter XXV
Dick saw the situation quickly and grasped it quietly. He pulled them out of themselves into the station, making plain its wonders.
— from Book I, Chapter XIX
He also explicitly shows that he is more attractive to Rosemary because of his age whereas the opposite is true with regards to his attraction for her:
When she opened the door she saw him as something fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable.
— from Book I, Chapter XXIV
Given Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the attractiveness of traditional masculine values, it should be no surprise that Nicole eventually falls for Tommy Barban who has the virility that Dick loses over the course of the book.
V. Romance
As aforementioned, the entire novel reads as a poem and nearly every passage is in some way romantic, but below is my shortlist of the most moving passages.
The following dialogue is beautiful and Fitzgerald writes it as though he’s instructing an actor on how to say the lines, which makes the words more realistic:
Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:
"You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming."
— from Book I, Chapter IV
Of Nicole and Dick’s romantic scenes, I found the following the most beautifully staged and communicated:
"You're a nice person—just keep using your own judgment about yourself."
"You like me?"
"Of course."
"Would you—" They were strolling along toward the dim end of the horseshoe, two hundred yards ahead. "If I hadn't been sick would you—I mean, would I have been the sort of girl you might have—oh, slush, you know what I mean."
— from Book II, Chapter VIII
The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.
— from Book II, Chapter VIII
This dialogue just breaks my heart:
"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night."
— from Book II, Chapter XVIII
VI. Dialogue
Much of the best dialogue is simple and universal, and the following short sequence captures thousands of conversations between man and wife through the generations:
"She's very attractive."
"She's an infant."
"She's attractive though."
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
"She's not as intelligent as I thought," Dick offered.
"She's quite smart."
"Not very, though—there's a persistent aroma of the nursery."
— from Book I, Chapter XI
Then he goes onto create pithy dialogue by constructing the answer to a question in an unexpected way:
"We won't go into that. Listen to me—this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?"
"It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see."
— from Book II, Chapter XV
One of the greatest scenes is when Dick gets drunk. Fitzgerald transitions from a nonsensical drunk comment to a comical description of his love interest vanishing to leaving out description and letting the different voices explain the action:
"Think it over," said Dick sagely.
"Think what over?"
"You know." It had been something about Collis going into his father's business—good sound advice.
Clay walked off into space. Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped—and she had disappeared.
"Have you seen her?"
"Seen who?"
"The girl I was dancing with. Su'nly disappeared. Must be in the building."
"No! No! That's the ladies' room."
— from Book II, Chapter XXII
Another funny bit of dialogue is an error in words from his partner that he automatically corrects given his background:
"Why not try another leave of abstinence?"
"Absence," Dick corrected him automatically. "It's no solution for me to go away."
— from Book III, Chapter II
Fitzgerald also frequently has his characters respond to an assumption rather than the actual question posed, which enriches conversations:
"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."
— from Book III, Chapter V
More beautiful drama where the dialogue, once again, engages with the subtext rather than the words spoken:
She went up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said:
"Don't be sad."
He looked at her coldly.
"Don't touch me!" he said.
Confused she moved a few feet away.
"Excuse me," he continued abstractedly. "I was just thinking what I thought of you—"
"Why not add the new classification to your book?"
"I have thought of it—'Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses—'"
"I didn't come over here to be disagreeable."
"Then why did you come, Nicole? I can't do anything for you any more. I'm trying to save myself."
"From my contamination?"
"Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes."
She wept with anger at the abuse.
"You're a coward! You've made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me."
— from Book III, Chapter IX
One more example of Dick going at one part of a statement rather than the whole, which makes it far more interesting:
"But we're all there is!" cried Mary. "If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment."
"Have I been nourished?" he asked.
— from Book III, Chapter XII
VIII. Miscellaneous
Through the novel, Fitzgerald contrasts Europe with America as well as the differences between its citizens. One of my favorite ways that he does this is through a beautiful anthropomorphism that concentrates much of the difference between the US and Europe by examining their railroad systems:
Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.
— from Book I, Chapter III
Fitzgerald also gives us philosophy that relates to stardom and professions that are difficult to enter into, but ultimately unfulfilling:
Dick closed the subject with a somewhat tart discussion of actors: "The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged."
— from Book I, Chapter XVI
The following is a great metaphor because it encapsulates the idea that one can be full of the excitement of the world, and he says that it reflects off of her, which gives you the impression that all of the energy is being directed towards this one person and she’s just revealing it back to him:
there was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect all the excitement of the world.
— from Book II, Chapter V
I found the following to be an interesting idea of unconditional love being made harder because you receive the gifts of it, which you enjoy so much that your natural instinct is to hold onto it greedily, making it harder to love unconditionally:
He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together—glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle.
— from Book II, Chapter VI
The mind, the mental creations, the imaginations—all of it is a house of cards compared to the instincts and emotions that keep us moving through life:
Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.
— from Book II, Chapter VII
I found the following to be incredibly true and pressing for us, as a society, to understand. Greatness is not easy:
Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
— from Book II, Chapter XIV
It was brilliant to cast Dick as a doctor because there’s a recurring theme of his attraction to birds with crushed wings that he seeks to aid. We’ve already discussed how he seeks these people for his own selfish needs, but here we see that there is a more wholesome part to his desire to care for the sick:
Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.
As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.
"That is for something," she whispered. "Something must come out of it."
He stooped and kissed her forehead.
"We must all try to be good," he said.
— from Book II, Chapter XIV
The wonderfully-phrased, true fact that one should either be all the way on or all the way off—never simmering:
He did not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity—he was all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.
— from Book II, Chapter XVII
I love when great artists discuss lesser forms of craft, and Fitzgerald comments on the derivativeness of most art with a tongue-in-cheek tone here:
His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him. Success had improved him and humbled him. He was no fool about his capacities—he realized that he possessed more vitality than many men of superior talent, and he was resolved to enjoy the success he had earned. "I've done nothing yet," he would say. "I don't think I've got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book." Fine dives have been made from flimsier spring-boards.
— from Book II, Chapter XIX
Fitzgerald makes another criticism of what was at the time a nascent movie industry. The idea of people who choose the cheapest form of entertainment on the menu is certainly true today (emphasis mine):
They were people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.
— from Book II, Chapter XX
This passage directly relates to Dick’s talent fading with his abuse of alcohol. It must have been incredibly painful for Fitzgerald to write about himself this way as he watched his talent fade in front of his eyes because of his addictions:
"For shame!" Kaethe said. "You're the solid one, you do the work. It's a case of hare and tortoise—and in my opinion the hare's race is almost done."
"Tch! Tch!"
"Very well, then. It's true."
— from Book III, Chapter I
I love this description of Dick’s sensitivity to those around him, and how harmful that level of openness can be:
Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away—realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war's ending—in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved—so easy to be loved—so hard to love.
— from Book III, Chapter II
Just as Nicole, who he helped heal, is no longer his; the beach that he took from squalid to beautiful has been overtaken by tasteless people:
Probably it was the beach he feared, like a deposed ruler secretly visiting an old court.
— from Book III, Chapter V
IX. Conclusion
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