Bram’s Reviews > Tender Is the Night > Status Update

tell me what you think of this.

Really good so far, but doesn't have the consistency or tightness of Gatsby. Fitzgerald was clearly influenced by Ulysses and other Modernist experimentation, although he still maintains something of his recognizable and straightforward storytelling. There's also a lot of outdated psychologizing that probably hasn't helped the book age well.

Still, nobody can quite romanticize upper-class life like Fitzgerald, even as he critiques it. His books have a certain allure that I think is related to middle class/bourgeois interest in the rich and famous. I know I can't help feeling thrilled when he describes Gatsby's house and party, as much as it feels awkward to admit. Tender has a lot of this in it, although the setting is Southern France and Paris rather than Long Island.

I agree. What's interesting, too, are the ways he reveals how jazz was taken up by those bourgeois American cultures, how the post-prohibition moment definitely made that class ripe for taking in musical and expressive cultural forms that, beforehand, were considered vulgar, 'low,' etc. He has a useful way of revealing the major high/low conflicts of that era.

Yeah, good points. There's a fascinating and disturbing part of the book where the rich, white characters become entangled with some black Americans in Paris, one of whom is murdered because of the drunken, apathetic thoughtlessness of one of the supporting (white) characters. What's really interesting is how minor the incident is played for the story, apart from the indirect psychological impact on one of the main characters--this plot thread enters and exits VERY abruptly, and the lack of real consequences/guilt involved is really disturbing. It seems like a subtle move on Fitzgerald's part to comment on certain conflicts of race and class, and how cavalierly the upper class deals with major issues outside of their circle, while minor ones within their circle inevitably take on enormous importance. To them, the murder is only a nuisance and perhaps a source of legal danger (although no consequences come of it at all, with a main character making sure that their names are kept out of dealings with police); since the black characters are new/unknown, Fitzgerald seems almost to dare the reader to side with the protagonists in thinking this is simply a nuisance and to feel no real concern. There are probably many ways to read this part though, and I don't really know enough about Fitzgerald and his beliefs to get a good handle on it.

Anyone who doesn't like Fitzgerald is a dirty socialist bastard. End of edict.

A Princeton alum who romanticized the upper-class? Who'd've thunk it. :P I tease.

Speaking of high/low (and getting a little low), this reminds me of some graffiti on a stall door in Firestone's C-floor men's bathroom, something like: "F Scott Fitzgerald probably pooped in here." I bet the person who wrote it deliberately pooped in that stall, hoping it were true.

Elizabeth wrote: "I've been struck by this in his descriptions of Nicole and Rosemary shopping, which I think he put in specifically for this purpose, and strike me as awkward because of it. He has Rosemary watching how Nicole spends money and thinking about it, and it's striking me as a little unreal. "

Yeah, I'd say that's only a minor part of it though. I'm thinking more of the settings--the Diver's beach house on the cliffs, Southern France as a general setting...with only the rich and famous on vacations, Nicole's rich history (along with what's-her-name's in Gatsby and the protagonist's in This Side of Paradise), Gatsby's place, the whole Long Island culture...everything about these books touches on the kinds of places and pleasures that are out of reach for most people reading the books. I think Fitzgerald intentionally tantalizes his readers with these things, more so than other writers coming from an upper class perspective. And I think that's a significant part of his allure as a writer--there are a lot of wannabe Gatsby's out there, even if they don't have his insane drive to achieve wealth and enter high society.

KFed wrote: "A Princeton alum who romanticized the upper-class? Who'd've thunk it. :P I tease.

Speaking of high/low (and getting a little low), this reminds me of some graffiti on a stall door in Firestone's ..."

Haha, I know exactly which bathroom you're talking about...can't believe the graffiti is still there.

One of my classmates was determined to bicker Cottage just because it was F. Scotty's eating club.

I can understand the allure. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a sexy beast.

Ah yes, maybe a little sickly-looking though. And then there's the Hemingway accusation.

Speaking of the beautiful and damned, is that a good book?

David, I didn't know you were into Fitzgerald. How has this never come up before?

Actually The Beautiful and Damned is my favorite Gatsby novel. Not because it's the Best® in an uppity literary sense, but because it's the most fun to read. It's about a young couple that comes from money and 'lives the life' (so to speak) but slowly dissipates into a life of indolence and pointlessness.

Wisp, I've read all of Fitz's novels (all of which I love, except This Side of Paradise which is only 'good'), but I have never ready any of his short stories...

Good to know, I'll definitely give that one a shot then. As I've been reading Tender is the Night, it strikes me that Fitzgerald is a near-perfect balance between Good literary writing and well-told compelling human stories. He routinely comes up with knockout sentences/comments, often at the end of a chapter.

I've always been afraid of his stories--I remember hearing from somewhere that he compromised many of them them for publication and basically just phoned them in for money. I'm sure there are some good ones too, but I don't really want to go looking.

You ever considered reading the unfinished Last Tycoon, D? I started it once while reading The Prisoner and The Fugitive, but those volumes stole my attention.

I have read The Last Tycoon, Wisp. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying it -- but y'know, it's letdown because it isn't finished.

'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' is sort of the signature, much-anthologized Fitzgerald short story.

Bram wrote: "What's really interesting is how minor the incident is played for the story, apart from the indirect psychological impact on one of the main characters--this plot thread enters and exits VERY abruptly, and the lack of real consequences/guilt involved is really disturbing. It seems like a subtle move on Fitzgerald's part to comment on certain conflicts of race and class"

Fitzgerald's personal views on race, and class, were pretty unenlightened - he's casually racist in a lot of his letters and notebooks, and he only ever wrote one short minor story late in his life, "Darling Heart," with a central black character. I think Fitzgerald focuses on the event mainly to indicate how low his characters have sunk (his epic biographer, Bruccoli, points out something similar - albeit not with a dead body - happened to Fitzgerald himself during a debauch). But I also think your reading is right, because it fits in with that famous passage about Nicole and Rosemary shopping and Fitzgerald's general critique of the upper-class in this book. (At one point he wanted to end it with Dick Diver sending his children off to be properly educated in the Soviet Union.) So it can be considered one of those cases where authors write better than they know.

Elizabeth wrote: "He has Rosemary watching how Nicole spends money and thinking about it, and it's striking me as a little unreal. "

Fitzgerald always had a problem with point of view - even Gatsby, his tightest novel, has it (how on earth does Carraway imagine when Gatsby and Daisy first kissed, for example?) but it's mostly overlooked because of the gorgeous prose. You can really see it in the drafts of the Last Tycoon where he has to indicate to himself 'This is so-and-so taking up the story.' Part of his intended effect in Book I of Tender is Rosemary's limited vision - we're meant to be as dazzled as she is and not understand the full extend of Diver's degradation and corruption until Book III - but at the same time it means some of his most famous set pieces in Book I don't quite come off technically, because she's an eighteen-year-old uneducated starlet.

Bram wrote: "I think Fitzgerald intentionally tantalizes his readers with these things, more so than other writers coming from an upper class perspective. And I think that's a significant part of his allure as a writer"

Malcolm Cowley, who knew all these people, zeroed in on this:

Fitzgerald has always been the poet of the American upper bourgeoisie; he has been the only writer able to invest their lives with glamor. Yet he has never been sure that he owed his loyalty to the class about which he was writing. It is as if he had a double personality. Part of him is a guest at the ball given by the people in the big house; part of him has been a little boy peeping in through the window and being thrilled by the music and the beautifully dressed women -- a romantic but hard-headed little boy who stops every once in a while to wonder how much it all cost and where the money came from.

And Bruccoli glosses this with Yeats on Keats in go Dominus Tuus:

No one denies to Keats love of the world;
Remember his deliberate happiness.
....His art is happy but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery stablekeeper—
Luxuriant song.

Fitzgerald loved Keats above all other poets and some of their central preoccupations are similar - high literary ambition coming from a poor background, love thwarted by poverty, &c. And Edmund Wilson basically turned Fitzgerald into a sort of socialist; he wrote his daughter severely about how he wanted her to read Das Kapital, and he often described himself in letters as an 'Irish peasant,' but he was also the highest-paid short-story writer in the country for years and wasting most of his income. He wrote an infamous article called 'How To Live on 36,000 A Year,' at a time when most families were living on much less. (There's a fascinating article about his tax returns here: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/liv...)

So his relationship with money was fraught, to say the least. (He wrote defensively to Hemingway after the 'they have more money' crack that 'Riches have never fascinated me unless combined with the greatest charm and distinction.' His ideal of the 'good life' was probably Gerald and Sara Murphy....but he blended them with himself and Zelda to show psychological and spiritual corruption, which at least indicates some extreme ambivalence.)

Elizabeth wrote: "I tried to read The Vegetable or From President to Postman in high school and it made me want to beat my head against the wall.

The Vegetable is just terrible. Even Fitzgerald admitted it was terrible. For all his love of inserting scenes into his early fiction, and his actual theatrical experience, he was not at all a playwright.

But I'm still in on the Fitzgerald love."

I'm with Buddy Glass: 'The Great Gatsby was my Huckleberry Finn.'

Bram wrote: "I've always been afraid of his stories--I remember hearing from somewhere that he compromised many of them them for publication and basically just phoned them in for money. I'm sure there are some good ones too, but I don't really want to go looking. "

Fitzgerald wrote his short stories for money, but he also used many of them as sort of drafts for his novels - to the extent of reusing the best passages from them, which he would then carefully strip from the stories when they were republished in book form. (Most modern anthologies of his stories restore his cuts.) Even the commercial ones are fun and well-written, but his major stories take up the same themes as the novels. You'd probably do pretty well with this compilation, which was edited by Bruccoli: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shor..., it's got most of the major ones. (My favourite short story of his ever is 'The Lost Decade' which is very short and like a sucker punch.)

The Last Tycoon is unfinished but I think he worked on polishing his prose as he wrote it - I don't think Wilson made any major cuts or added transitions when he edited it, unlike Aswell and Wolfe (or for that matter Perkins and Wolfe). It's impossible to say how much the outline would have influenced Fitzgerald because he thought it would be a short novel like Gatsby, but he'd already written about 1/3 of the story in 2/3 of the space he'd allotted himself, and he tended to rewrite his novels heavily even in proof. But what we have of it is beautiful.

Elizabeth wrote: "it reminded me that Fitzgerald meant to be delivering this as mostly Rosemary's point of view in a lot of book I and that he kept slipping around"

Yeah, Cowley and some other critics who knew how long he'd struggled to write the novel said he'd kept it in his head too long - and I think even Fitzgerald admitted 'The man who started it is not the man who finished it,' and there's a big difference between the lush opening where Rosemary is dazzled (like we are!) by the Divers and the parts where we're supposed to guess that there's Something Wrong and it just doesn't hang quite right. But I think that was more one of Fitzgerald's problems all along - you can really see it in his first novel, where the authorial voice comments and soliloquizes and editorializes all over the place. I think at least part of it is that he grew up as a writer reading a lot of neo-Victorian stuff like Compton Mackenzie and then he ran smack into the moderns, after he'd already developed as an artist, in the thirties. I know Hemingway was a huge influence on him both wrt dialogue and that very tight limited third person POV where it's all implication.

(Sorry for babbling all over your post, Bram, I just love Fitzgerald deeply!)

No need to apologize--all of them fascinating posts!

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied

That is just fantastic. I am also a Fitz fan, and thanks for all the information Moira! You've done your reading on him!