Book Review: The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

Original dust jacket of The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, early 1920's.

After the overnight success of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, 1920’s This Side of Paradise, which I reviewed here, he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, just two years later in March of 1922. The novel covers several years in the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria. Anthony has a sizable living allowance, intellectual pretensions, and not much talent or drive. Both of his parents are deceased, and he’s biding his time until he gets the huge financial windfall that will surely occur once his wealthy grandfather Adam Patch dies. The novel follows Anthony’s courtship of Gloria, and their travels as they drink, spend too much money, and wait for Anthony’s grandfather to shuffle off his mortal coil. 

At the end of the first chapter of the book, in an odd section entitled, “A Flash-Back in Paradise,” it is revealed that Gloria is the personification of Beauty, “who was born anew every hundred years.” (p.26) This is an odd choice for a novel that is otherwise committed to social realism, and highlights the fact that Fitzgerald actually wasn’t that committed to social realism as a style, which is one of the faults of the book. 

The Beautiful and Damned is filled with beautiful writing, but unfortunately it’s in the service of two main characters who soon become tiresome. Anthony has little with which to fill his days, which leads to this marvelous passage:

“His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.” (p.50) 

Gloria is defined largely by her beauty, which makes some sense; given that she’s apparently the personification of Beauty, but it makes her uninteresting and shallow as a character. 

Another main character in the book is Richard Caramel, a successful novelist who is Gloria’s cousin. I don’t think Caramel is meant to be a self-portrait of Fitzgerald, but there are some similarities between the two. Fitzgerald writes of Caramel: “His book was nearly ready, and as it grew in completeness it seemed to grow also in its demands, sapping him, overpowering him, until he walked haggard and conquered in its shadow.” (p.71) This would be an apt description of Fitzgerald a decade later, as he struggled to finish Tender is the Night. 

Anthony and Caramel have a conversation where they discuss an interview Caramel gave. Anthony says that he thought it was good: “Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.” (p.178) Fitzgerald actually said the same thing in a self-interview that was published just after This Side of Paradise was released in 1920. It’s a brilliant quote from a young writer, and of course it contains the prophecy of what happened to The Great Gatsby. Although Gatsby didn’t initially sell as well as This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, after Fitzgerald’s death it was rediscovered by critics and the public at large, and of course now almost every high school student in the United States reads Gatsby. 

At the very end of the book, there’s a rather funny in-joke when Caramel says: “You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read This Side of Paradise.” (p.396)

In another similarity between Caramel and Fitzgerald, Caramel’s successful novel is titled The Demon Lover. Just after This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication in September of 1919, Fitzgerald started work on a new novel, provisionally titled The Demon Lover. (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.98) However, it doesn’t seem as though any part of Fitzgerald’s The Demon Lover survived. Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote: “Nothing is known about its plot.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.106)

Alcohol is one of the main themes of the book, which makes sense given Fitzgerald’s alcoholism. Anthony’s slide into alcoholic dissipation is a prelude to Dick Diver’s similar descent in Tender is the Night. Geraldine, Anthony’s proletariat girlfriend, says to him, “You drink all the time, don’t you?” Anthony replies, “Why, I suppose so. Don’t you?” Geraldine says: “Nope. I go on parties sometimes—you know, about once a week, but I only take two or three drinks. You and your friends keep on drinking all the time. I should think you’d ruin your health.” (p.81) 

In the second half of the novel, the Patches come to “the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement.” (p.261) Not a good sign.

It’s hard to not just read The Beautiful and Damned as a chronicle of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage. I try not to read too much autobiography into Fitzgerald’s writings without hard evidence to back it up, but the novel feels very close to home, given what we know about Scott and Zelda’s lives.

Anthony and Gloria’s marriage, much like Scott and Zelda’s, is tempestuous from the very start. Anthony “felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.” (p.124) That’s maybe a sign that things aren’t going so well. 

Like Scott and Zelda, the Patches quarrel a lot: “Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust.” (p.125) 

We can get some sense of what the early days of Scott and Zelda’s marriage was like from Andrew Turnbull’s biography of Fitzgerald. One of Turnbull’s sources is the diary of Alexander McKaig, a classmate of Scott’s at Princeton who saw them frequently during this time. 

April 12, 1920: “I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years.” (Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull, p.119) This was less than two weeks after their marriage. 

October 12, 1920: “If she’s there Fitz can’t work—she bothers him—if she’s not there he can’t work—worried of what she might do…I told her she would have to make up her mind whether she wanted to go in movies or get in with young married set. To do that would require a little effort & Zelda will never make an effort.” (p.120)

December 11, 1920: “I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate.” (p.121) 

Of course, Scott and Zelda were headed towards catastrophe, but the party would roll on for many more years. McKaig’s observation that Zelda could go into the movies mirrors Gloria’s friendship with Bloeckman, a movie producer who is always pestering her to make a screen test. At the end of the novel, Gloria finally does make a screen test, and, shock and horror; she’s told she’s too old to be a leading lady! She would have to settle for character parts! Rather than face the indignity of having to play something less than a leading role, Gloria doesn’t pursue acting. 

Like Scott and Zelda, Anthony and Gloria are terrible with money. Grandfather Adam says to Anthony about his income: “It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not.” (p.130) Like Scott and Zelda, Anthony and Gloria continually overspend and throughout the book Anthony is selling off bonds to tide them over. Scott did not have the family wealth that Anthony did—although his mother’s side of the family did have money, there was no trust fund for young Scott to live off of. He would have to make his own way in the world, and he did. From the time he was 22 years old, Scott Fitzgerald supported himself entirely as a free-lance fiction writer. During the decade of the 1920’s, Scott made just under $250,000 from his writings. That would be roughly $3.4 million or so in 2018 dollars. That should have been more than enough for the Fitzgeralds. But it wasn’t, and Scott was always taking out advances from Scribner’s, his very generous publishers. In 1924, Scott wrote a very funny article entitled, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The joke of the piece was that Scott and Zelda couldn’t live on $36,000 a year, despite their occasional attempts at financial management. In 1924, two-thirds of Americans earned less than $1,500 a year, and I wonder how funny those two-thirds of Americans found Scott’s article. 

Anthony quickly learns after his marriage to Gloria what his duties will be: “The management of Gloria’s temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony’s day.” (p.151) 

There are other connections to Fitzgerald’s other writings and to his own life throughout the novel. Alert Fitzgerald fans will notice a precursor to Gatsby’s famous line about repeating the past when Gloria says “You can’t ever quite repeat anything.” (p.159)

A line that a character has about non-fiction being “a sort of literature that’s half fiction and half fact” actually came from Fitzgerald’s 1920 story “The I.O.U.,” which was rejected by magazines and eventually published in I’d Die For You, a 2017 collection of previously unpublished short stories. (Quote from p.250) 

When Anthony joins the military after the United States enters World War I, he puts down “author” as his occupation, and then changes it to “student.” (p.309) This is the opposite of Fitzgerald’s own response to a 1919 survey of World War I soldiers: he wrote “was student—am now writer.” 

The Beautiful and Damned is overstuffed, and, clocking in at 420 plus pages in the most recent paperback edition, could have used some editing. It’s pretty amazing that Fitzgerald was able to go from the put it all in style of this book to the graceful economy of The Great Gatsby. 

Like This Side of Paradise, there’s not much narrative drive in The Beautiful and Damned. There’s no real tension—you’re just seeing scene after scene of these people. As Fitzgerald writes, “There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.” (p.393) 

Fitzgerald conceived of The Beautiful and Damned and wrote it fairly quickly. In August of 1920, he wrote to Charles Scribner, outlining the plot: 

“My new novel, called ‘The Flight of the Rocket’ concerns the life of Anthony Patch between his 25^th and 33^rd years (1913-1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.135) 

Fitzgerald finished The Beautiful and Damned just before he and Zelda sailed for Europe in May, 1921. It was their first trip to Europe, and, ironically enough for two of the most famous American expatriates of the 1920’s, they didn’t like it. 

The Beautiful and Damned was serialized in Metropolitan magazine from September 1921 to March 1922. Scott and Zelda were back in Scott’s hometown of Saint Paul during that time, as Scott worked on the final proofs for the book. Unfortunately, the serialization may have harmed the book’s chances for success, as Carl Hovey, the editor of Metropolitan, “clipped and cut it up abominably,” according to a letter Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins. (The Far Side of Paradise, p.158) As James L.W. West III writes in his introduction to the 2008 edition of The Beautiful and Damned, “Much of Anthony’s dissolute behavior was excised; most of Gloria’s sexual allure was removed. Satire was blunted, criticisms of organized religion were deleted, and characterization was simplified.” (p.xi) 

Arthur Mizener’s comments on The Beautiful and Damned are insightful as to the faults of the book: “It is, compared to This Side of Paradise, a painstakingly thought-out book, and for that reason a much less effective one.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.151) Both novels took a rather scattershot approach to their material, as Fitzgerald stuffed in as much as he could into both books, but for me This Side of Paradise had a youthful, off-handed charm that The Beautiful and Damned lacks. Perhaps that’s due to how Fitzgerald matured and changed in the intervening years. The Beautiful and Damned is also a darker book than This Side of Paradise, and bleaker in its worldview. 

Mizener also felt that Fitzgerald made a fundamental error in his handling of Anthony and Gloria: “Fitzgerald never made up his mind whether he wanted to stand apart from them and treat them satirically or enter into their experience with sympathy and understanding.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.153-4) I agree with Mizener; it was never clear to me how the reader is supposed to feel about Anthony and Gloria. Matthew J. Bruccoli makes the same point in his Fitzgerald biography, writing bluntly: “The novel does not maintain a consistent attitude towards its characters.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.151)

Zelda herself wrote a review of The Beautiful and Damned, which appeared in the New York Tribune in April of 1922, a month after the novel’s publication. Zelda’s review is quite funny, and she astutely noticed what Scott seemed to have missed: the fact that Gloria has birthdays in three different months—February, May, and September. The mystery of Gloria’s birthdays is addressed in the 2008 edition of the book, and while other errors in the book have been cleaned up, there was no way to change Gloria’s birthdays without seriously altering the chronology of the novel, so her three birthdays remain unchanged.

The most famous part of Zelda’s review is as follows:

“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” (Appendix 2, p.429)

Biographers of both Scott and Zelda have quarreled over the importance of this paragraph for years. To feminist critics and biographers, this has offered proof that Scott was using Zelda’s life as material for his own fiction, and it paints him as a domineering husband.  Matthew J. Bruccoli, probably Scott’s most sympathetic biographer, defends Fitzgerald from Zelda’s charges, writing: “None of Fitzgerald’s surviving manuscripts shows her hand, though Zelda’s manuscripts bear his revisions. She did play an important role in his work—apart from providing him with a model—because he trusted her literary judgement and acted on her criticisms. But Zelda was never his collaborator.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.162)

Of course, the truth could be somewhere in between. We can’t know Zelda’s intention behind the allegations—the entire review is written in a very satiric, ironic voice, so is her plagiarism allegation a mocking joke that isn’t meant to be taken seriously, or is it a more pointed criticism? We also don’t know what Scott’s reaction to Zelda’s review was. Did Scott laugh it off as a private joke between the two of them, or was he angered when he read Zelda’s review? 

The fight between Scott and Zelda over who could fictionalize their own lives would explode again a decade later as Zelda was writing her novel Save Me the Waltz and Scott was at work on Tender is the Night. Scott felt that Zelda’s book would cover some of the same ground that his own novel would, and he tried to dissuade her from publishing it. Scott eventually edited Save Me the Waltz, but because no manuscript of the novel exists before his involvement, we don’t know how much of the material he changed. Scott’s behavior during this time was abhorrent, culminating in a May 1933 meeting between Scott, Zelda, her psychiatrist, and a stenographer, who typed out a 114-page record of the proceedings. It’s quoted in Bruccoli’s biography, and it’s not pretty. As Bruccoli writes, “The angry discussion ranged over many of the fissures in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, but the crux was Fitzgerald’s insistence on the authority to veto Zelda’s writing plans.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.345) Both Scott and Zelda talked of divorce during the meeting. That probably would have been the best thing for both of them. 

What may have been lighthearted teasing in 1922 had turned into hatred and resentment on both sides a decade later. 

In 1930, shortly after Zelda entered Malmaison Clinic for treatment after her first mental breakdown, Scott wrote her a painfully heartfelt letter. We don’t know if Scott ever sent the letter to Zelda or not. “I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other” (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, p.65) 

That seems like a fitting final word on The Beautiful and Damned.

Book Review: Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

Original cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night, 1934.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, probably late 1920's, as he was writing the novel that would become Tender is the Night.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, early 1930's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night is a powerful and beautiful book that stands next to The Great Gatsby as his other masterpiece. Much like Gatsby, Tender is the Night was underrated upon its original publication and has only grown in stature throughout the years. 

Tender is the Night tells the story of Dick and Nicole Diver’s marriage and Dick’s subsequent descent into alcoholism. The novel opens on the beach of the French Riviera. We first see the Divers through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, an eighteen year-old actress so young that “the dew was still on her.” (p.4) Rosemary becomes fascinated with the Divers very quickly, especially the charming Dick. Rosemary imagines that the Divers’ glamourous lives are free from worries: “Rosemary envied them their fun, imagining a life of leisure unlike her own. She knew little of leisure but she had the respect for it of those who have never had it. She thought of it as a resting, without realizing that the Divers were as far from relaxing as she was herself.” (p.99) 

Rosemary is absent from the novel during the beginning of part II, as the narration flashes back to flesh out Dick’s backstory. We see him as a young psychologist who meets Nicole Warren, successfully treats her, and falls in love with her. Part III of the novel is set several years after Part I, and we witness Dick’s dissipation.

Because The Great Gatsby, published in April, 1925, had not become the huge success that Fitzgerald thought it would be, he quickly started work on a follow-up, optimistically thinking that he could deliver another novel soon, with his first target date being the fall of 1926. However, Tender is the Night went through an extraordinarily long and painful gestation period, and it was not published until April, 1934, nine years to the month after Gatsby. During those nine long years many things happened to Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and many of the events of his life would help to shape the plot of Tender is the Night. As Fitzgerald biographer and scholar Scott Donaldson wrote in his essay on the composition of Tender is the Night, “The novel could not possibly have achieved the power of its final form without the passage of nine years between inception and completion.” (Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, p.126) Fitzgerald himself said to a friend, “The man who started the novel is not the man who finished it.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew Bruccoli, p.365) 

Fitzgerald always worked extremely hard at his writing, but his previous novels had come together much quicker than Tender is the Night. It’s telling of Fitzgerald’s struggle with writing the novel that “progress, lack of” is one of the longest categories for Tender is the Night in the index of Matthew Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. 

Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, which was always problematic, spiraled out of control during the years he was writing Tender is the Night.  During that same period his marriage to Zelda Sayre was rapidly disintegrating, and she also suffered a series of mental breakdowns, in 1930, 1932, and 1934. 

It’s overly simplistic to say that Fitzgerald was Dick Diver, and Zelda was Nicole Warren Diver, but there were certainly similarities. Fitzgerald always mined his own life and his own experiences, and Zelda’s as well, for his fiction, and he did so in Tender is the Night. 

In Arthur Mizener’s 1965 edition of his biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, Mizener reprints notes that Fitzgerald made about characters in Tender is the Night. Some of these notes further underscore the connection between Fitzgerald and Dick Diver, as Fitzgerald wrote, “For his external qualities, use anything of Gerald, Ernest, Ben Finny, Archie Mcliesh, Charley McArthur or myself.  He looks, though, like me.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.348) The Ernest in the quotation is Hemingway, and Gerald is Gerald Murphy, another likely model for aspects of Dick Diver. Gerald and Sara Murphy were wealthy American expatriates who lived in France in the 1920’s and were renowned for their parties and the wide social circle of artists they knew. Scott and Zelda were good friends of the Murphys’, although Scott’s bad behavior did get him ejected from several of the Murphys’ parties, and Fitzgerald dedicated Tender is the Night to them. Certainly the bon vivant Dick Diver of Part I of Tender is the Night owes a large debt to Gerald Murphy, although Murphy did not slide into dissipated alcoholism the way Diver did. 

Under notes for Nicole Diver, Fitzgerald wrote: “Portrait of Zelda—that is, a part of Zelda.” (Paradise, p.350) It seems clear that Fitzgerald used some of Zelda’s characteristics in creating Nicole Diver, but even in this note he makes it clear that he used only a part of Zelda, and not her whole personality. 

While I think that Dick Diver is not simply a stand-in for F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are several interesting similarities between author and character. In the beginning of the novel, Diver is described as someone who gives “carnivals of affection” to people. (p.27) Sober, Fitzgerald was an extremely charming man, and there are many stories about the effect his personality had on people. Andrew Turnbull was a biographer of Fitzgerald’s who also knew him. Fitzgerald rented a house on the Turnbull’s property in Maryland in 1932, when Andrew was 11 years old. Turnbull wrote of him: “Fitzgerald focused on you—even riveted on you—and if there was one thing you were sure of, it was that whatever you happened to be talking about was the most important matter in the world.” (Scott Fitzgerald, p.225) Turnbull also wrote of him: “…there was always something of the magician in Fitzgerald. He was the inventor, the creator, the tireless impresario who brightened our days and made other adult company seem dull and profitless. It wasn’t so much any particular skill of his as a quality of caring, of believing, of pouring his whole soul and imagination into whatever he did with us.” (Turnbull, p.229)

In a 1938 letter Fitzgerald wrote about Diver: “Dick’s curiosity and interest in people was real—he didn’t stare at them—he glanced at them and felt them.” (Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson, p.196) Although this is a subjective judgment, I would bet that Fitzgerald was like that too. He was a highly sensitive man who was fascinated by people and would often pepper them with questions at parties. 

Fitzgerald mined his real life in the passages describing Dick Diver’s father. Fitzgerald’s father Edward died in 1931, and in an unfinished essay, “The Death of My Father,” Fitzgerald reflected on his importance to his own upbringing:

 “I loved my father—always deep in my subconscious I have referred judgements back to him, to what he would have thought or done. He loved me—and felt a deep responsibility for me—I was born several months after the sudden death of my two elder sisters and he felt what the effect of this would be on my mother, that he would be my only moral guide. He became that to the best of his ability. He came from tired old stock with very little left of vitality and mental energy but he managed to raise a little for me.” (A Short Autobiography, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2011, p.118)

This passage is repeated almost word for word when Dick learns of his father’s death: 

“Dick loved his father—again and again he referred judgements to what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide. He was of tired stock yet he raised himself to that effort.” (Tender is the Night, p.203) 

When a young Dick Diver is asked about his plans, he replies, “I’ve only got one, Franz, and that’s to be a good psychologist—maybe to be the greatest one that ever lived.” (p.132) This quote mirrors what Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson—Wilson recalled Fitzgerald saying to him, after they had attended Princeton together, “I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don’t you?” (Fool for Love, p.37) 

Dick Diver is also a habitual flirt, as was Fitzgerald. “He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall.” (p.201) Fitzgerald’s infatuations could begin with just a glance as well. The actress Carmel Myers recalled introducing Fitzgerald to a woman at a party in Hollywood. Fitzgerald’s first words to the woman were, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” (Fool for Love, p.53) 

The most obvious parallel between Dick Diver and Fitzgerald is their drinking. During the period he was writing Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s drinking became extremely problematic. Fitzgerald had always been a heavy drinker, but now his alcoholism was taking a toll on his friendships and his ability to focus on his writing. One of the most beautiful, sad lines in Tender is the Night is when Nicole says to Dick, “But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.” (p.267) I think this line rings true for Fitzgerald as well. For whatever reason, Fitzgerald behaved in very self-destructive ways and lost many friendships because of this, especially during the period when he was writing Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald biographer Scott Donaldson wrote: “In his papers at Princeton are at least three lists of snubs, with the longest of them naming a total of sixty-six people who had snubbed him during the 1925-29 period. To have been put down by so many in so short a time suggests (1) that some of the snubs were imaginary rather than real, though it was during these years that he and Zelda became personae non gratae because of their drinking and quarreling, and (2) that out of masochism or self-hatred he was actually courting the disapproval of others.” (Fool for Love, p.181)

When he was drunk, Fitzgerald’s personality underwent a radical transformation. The charming and intelligent man disappeared and he became belligerent and mean. Fitzgerald tried the patience of Gerald and Sara Murphy, as he threw ashtrays at one party and deliberately broke wineglasses at another. The incident at the end of Tender is the Night, the nadir of Dick Diver’s descent into drink, where he gets into a fight with an Italian taxi driver, and gets beaten up and taken to jail, actually happened to Fitzgerald himself. (Fool for Love, p.164-5) 

Another subject of Tender is the Night is marital infidelity, which was yet another issue that the Fitzgeralds dealt with. Both Scott and Zelda were attractive people who enjoyed flirting, but a serious threat to their marriage developed during the summer of 1924. As Scott was finishing up The Great Gatsby, Zelda was spending more and more time with French aviator Edouard Jozan. Whether or not Zelda and Jozan actually had a physical affair is a subject of debate among Fitzgerald scholars, but whatever the particulars were, their relationship created a great deal of tension between Scott and Zelda. Scott wrote years later in his notebooks, “That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.” (The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.113) Scott had a relationship with actress Lois Moran, who was only seventeen when they met in 1927. Moran became the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender is the Night, who is in many ways presented as Nicole Diver’s opposite. 

Insanity is another prominent theme in Tender is the Night, and yet another way that Fitzgerald’s turbulent personal life found its way into his fiction. Zelda’s breakdowns prompted Scott to make mental health a theme of the novel. Nicole’s sister Baby Warren asks Dick, “Well, how can anyone tell what’s eccentric and what’s crazy?” (p.151) This quote seems especially apropos of Zelda and Scott’s behavior, both drunken and sober. Is it crazy or eccentric to throw yourself down a flight of stone steps? (Zelda) Is it crazy or eccentric to burn your clothes in a bathtub in a fit of jealousy? (Zelda) Is it crazy or eccentric to jump into the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel? (Scott) Is it crazy or eccentric to throw ashtrays at a fancy dinner party? (Scott) The list could go on and on.

Zelda actually wrote her own novel during the time Scott was laboring over his long-awaited book. Titled Save Me the Waltz, it was written in only a month or two while Zelda was undergoing treatment at Johns Hopkins. The mere existence of the book deeply angered Scott, as he did not know Zelda was writing a novel, and was probably jealous that Zelda had written her book so quickly while he was laboring through numerous drafts and revisions of his own novel. Save Me the Waltz added considerably to what was now a state of continual tension and resentment between Scott and Zelda. Scott was hopeful that Save Me the Waltz would earn enough money so he could discharge his debt to Scribner’s, who had been advancing him money throughout the writing of Tender is the Night. That did not happen, as Save Me the Waltz was published in October, 1932 to little fanfare and not much interest from the book-buying public. 

As befitting the difficult writing, even the title of Tender is the Night was a long time in coming. The book went through many possible titles. Among the early titles were Our Type, The World’s Fair, The Melarky Case, and The Boy Who Killed His Mother. (Works and Days, p.120) Even as the novel took shape, the title still kept changing, from The Drunkard’s Holiday, to Doctor Diver’s Holiday, to Richard Diver, and then finally, to Tender is the Night, from a line in John Keats’ poem, “Ode to a Nightingale.” (Works and Days, p.135) 

Tender is the Night was published to generally positive reviews, and the book sold respectably, but, as usual, not as well as Fitzgerald had hoped. Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli wrote of the reception of Tender is the Night, “As a consequence of Fitzgerald’s commercial magazine work and his playboy image it had become increasingly difficult for critics to appraise the serious novelist…Fitzgerald’s wastrel reputation impeded the recognition of his best work.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.366)

Fitzgerald’s disappointment over the sales of Tender is the Night led him to second-guess the novel’s structure, and by late 1938 or early 1939 he was attempting to re-structure the book in chronological order, thinking this might make it more appealing to readers. After Fitzgerald’s death, Malcolm Cowley used Fitzgerald’s notes for his planned re-structuring as the basis for the 1951 revision of Tender is the Night. Today Cowley’s version is out of print, and most scholars and critics prefer Fitzgerald’s original 1934 version of the novel. Fitzgerald’s tinkering with Tender is the Night may show his insecurities, but it is also further proof of his dedication to his craft and his seriousness about writing. He was constantly rewriting and editing, making numerous changes to the novel between the magazine serialization in Scribner’s and the final book publication.

Scott Donaldson wrote of Tender is the Night, “It was a novel undervalued in its own time, one whose reputation has developed over the decades.” (Works and Days, p.138) Now Fitzgerald fans put the novel alongside The Great Gatsby as one of Fitzgerald’s masterpieces. 

Towards the end of the novel, Fitzgerald writes of Nicole: “She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.” (p.294) This is just one of the many beautiful, moving sentences from a novel written by an author who felt so deeply the pain and ecstasy of human existence, and described it all so well.