In Defense of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night
Open your copy and if you find it is in five parts (Case History, 1917-1919, Rosemary's Angle, 1919-1925, Casualties, 1925, Escape, 1925-1929, The Way Home, 1929-1930) shut it fast. Dump it. Don't waste your time. That 1951 edition is based on notes found after Fitzgerald's death. In it the story is simplified for those critics who found the original novel too hard to follow.
Writers appear so confident. The truth is far from that. We love words and moving them about. Life in its beauty and cruelty are our food. We take the bitter with the sweet. But misunderstand us or not get what we write and you land a punch to our gut. Tender Is the Night met a cold reception when it first came out, one which its author hoped he could later thaw. A five part linear narrative was the result after his death. What a lesson this is that notes in drawers with the dead should be left to rest in peace.
Read the original from 1934 not Malcolm Cowley's cut and paste job of this great novel. The latter does Fitzgerald no favors and merely testifies to the depths of disappointment and haze of alcohol which clouded the author's last years.
I read as many do for escape. Yet, as a writer I also delight in form. This one is broken into three parts or books, nothing so unusual in that. Beginning, middle and the end. What's to like? Just this. Fitzgerald flips two of them. He begins in the middle, follows with what comes before, then finishes with the end. The result is you read the first part wondering why. The second part appears to explain it yet leads you to ask "What now?" The third part delivers an answer.
In the edition of this novel published after Fitzgerald's death, a linear sequence is clamped on it like braces on a polio victim's legs. The story, as a consequence, loses all flow. The questions which should pull the reader along disappear. All you are left with is the clumping sound of someone taking too long to walk down a hall. That version should never have seen print and may explain why some readers dislike the novel. It was a knee jerk reaction to critics who couldn't cope with time jumps.
A straight time sequence is easy to produce. Flipping it, how Fitzgerald does, is magic. Just as tin cans stripped of labels and filled with water can hold flowers in a pinch, three by a window in a north facing kitchen give you . . . decor. Faces brighten when guests enter. So did mine reading this novel though its subject matter (adultery, alcoholism, and mental illness) should make me shiver.
What lights the darkness is the writing. Oh, you'll have to look. Don't expect gardens lush with roses or fields with wildflowers blowing left and right. The beauty of this novel progresses from the darkness with effort akin to poppies raising their heads from cracks in concrete. Joys are intermittent and no less for that. Here are three poppies from Tender Is the Night.
"The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by the sea-plants through the clear shadows."
"Noon dominated sea and sky - even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur."
"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 gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hands."
Who needs roses when F. Scott Fitzgerald comes bearing poppies?
