Metropolitan Magazine - Zelda Fitzgerald, 1922
It took me longer to finish Tender is the Night than I had anticipated. It begins with an alluring and frightening portrait of a man and a woman commonly thought to be stand-ins for Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – Dick Diver, a young psychiatrist, and Nicole Warren, the institutionalized heiress to an American railroad fortune. The middle and end become muddled in a cluster of dull American expat antics, which will be tiresome to anyone who has read anyone who has read much early 20th century American fiction.
The novel annihilates its own clarity as quickly as it can. We learn in the opening pages that Nicole was raped by her father and molested by the family chauffeur at a young age.
She writes letters to Dick, pregnant with longing for sympathy, who has treated her on occasion in the Swiss sanatorium in which her family keeps her imprisoned.
As people who know me well might imagine, this plot resonated with my history, if only in that much of it was set in Zürich, where I lived for three years as a child. Many of the locations described in the novel are indelibly imprinted in my mind. Oddly enough, I lived up the block from a sanatorium in Kilchberg, and across the street from Thomas Mann’s old house. The house had an unimpeded view of the Zürichsee.
Nicole writes to Dick
DEAR CAPTAIN DIVER:
I write to you because there is no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcical situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you. The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. My family has shamefully neglected me, and there’s no use asking them for help or pity. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my head is curable.
Here I am in what appears to be a semi-insane-asylum, all because nobody saw fit to tell me the truth about anything.
Nicole and Dick marry shortly after she pulls him in with an electrifying kiss at a party. Dr. Diver, who in the opening pages burns his medical textbooks for heat during World War I, has his marriage brokered by Nicole’s older sister, Baby:
“A burst of hilarity surged up in Dick, the Warrens were going to buy Nicole a doctor – You got a nice doctor you can let us use?”
Their relationship does not go well. It fades gradually in an alcoholic haze of parties, idiot expat banter and interminable European holidays. Diver opens a clinic with Warren money, where he acts as a mercenary psychiatrist “repairing” the children of the wealthy.
I felt attracted to Nicole. I don’t think I’ve read any other novel that has left me feeling so romantically vulnerable. This could be an effect of the changes that I have been going through in my own life, a credit to Fitzgerald’s brilliance, or a combination of both.
She seemed to be a real person, vital, grasping, fighting for her life, trying anything that she could to gain some fresh air for herself after a youth spent in both real and metaphorical prisons. She saw a savior in a man who regarded her as little more than a pretty, crazy and clever patient, drawn to her only by some unconscious pull that he never bothers to untangle. He sees who she is, and becomes afraid, intimidated, and then turns away from her soul, leaving her to wither, hopeless and alone.
At the end, his reputation in shambles, his marriage ending in divorce, with Nicole floating into an affair with an idiot soldier, he expresses his exasperation with the banal solitude of his life:
“You’re all so dull,” he said.
“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.
Tender is the Night has nothing to do with the “corruption of wealth” or any other such nonsense that covers up the true theme, that which is supported by the text itself, without referring to a perverse ideological lens. It’s about how society defines fidelity to reality as madness, and how much money and social effort must be applied to keep the truth at bay.
But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over, and around a dyke. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
What Dick calls madness is the simple truth. I would rather be on the side of the tide than to be one of the fools shoveling dirt onto a failing dam.
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February 18, 2009 at 4:55 pm
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