Tender is the Night
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About this ebook
In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.
Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate.
F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.
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Reviews for Tender is the Night
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What our readers think
Readers find this title to be a laborious reading, but appreciate F S Fitzgerald's keen eye and modern way of describing things. There are treasures to discover inside.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Read from a tropical rooftop in the heat of a Mexican summer. The book takes you places no matter your station in life.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It’s a hard reading! At a certain point, I checked on the Internet if other readers had thaught the same - to my relief, that’s the case. The book is famous for being a laborious reading. Nevertheless, F S Fitzgerald has such a keen eye, and such a modern way of describing what he sees... I mist reread this book! There are treasures to discover inside.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In 1932, F Scott Fitgerald was living in suburban Baltimore. His father had recently died and his wife Zelda had been committed to a psychiatric institution in Switzerland. He finally decided that the novel on which he had been working on and off since the publication of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925 would be about the destruction of a man of great promise through an ill-judged marriage. In writing the novel, Fitzgerald liberally used material from his life. This material included his relationship with Zelda, their life together in France, the life-style of wealthy American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, the death of his father, his alcoholism, what he had learned about psychiatry since Zelda had her first mental breakdown, and his despair at what he considered to be the waste of his potential as a writer. The novel which emerged from this extraordinarily difficult period in Fitzgerald's life is not easy to read. At first I thought I didn't want to keep reading, so little did I care about the characters and their concerns. However, when the narrative moved into flashback, detailing the circumstances leading up to the marriage of the central characters, Dick and Nicole Driver, I became interested in the narrative and that interest was sustained until the end.Knowing that this is the most autobiographical of Fitzgerald's works and understanding a little about the circumstances under which he wrote it adds poignancy to the reading experience. Fitzgerald clearly felt very sorry for himself, but from that self-pity was born a powerful and haunting novel.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the late 1920s, Rosemary Hoyt, a young Hollywood starlet, encounters the glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver on a beach in the French Riviera and falls in love with the pair, particularly Dick. However, all is not as it seems in the Divers' marriage with Dick playing the role of both husband and doctor to Nicole whose mental illness is a constantly recurring third party in their disintegrating relationship.First and foremost a character study, Tender Is the Night slowly reveals the inner-workings of Dick Diver over the course of several years, investigating how an intelligent and ambitious man ended up in a relationship in which he feels he is slowly losing his independence. However, surrounding the melancholy tale of Dick, Fitzgerald beautifully describes several parts of Europe and the life of the idle rich American expats who lived there during the late 1920s. A read that is great not only to experience the skills of an author near the height of his brilliance but to empathetically observe Dick on his decline
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is strategically broken up into 3 sections. Each section lends itself to a different perspective of the story, and each one made me re-evaluate my character adoration levels. I didn't rank it as high as Gatsby, because, well...it's not Gatsby, but I did enjoy it overall.
Summary:
We start out with Book One, and are introduced to Rosemary, the American acress, who meets up with Dick Diver and his wife Nicole. At this point in the story, I am in love. In my mind, Dick Diver and Jay Gatsby are one in the same - surrounded by parties, surrounded by meaningless people with lots of giggling, and lots of drinking going on. It appears to be a happy time, and you are instantly drawn into the lightheartedness that obviously exists on the French Riviera. Rosemary is, of course, enamored with Dick, and even comes to love Nicole. Good times.
Book Two, however, takes on a different side altogether, where we learn the backstory of the Divers. Turns out that Dick is actually a psychoanalyst and that his patient is Nicole. This part makes no sense to me. Guys aren't typically into this much drama, and it's almost as if he's talking himself into this pairing. I know he says that he loves her, but I never did get the really strong feeling that he did. This section really started me thinking that perhaps Dick wasn't all that strong of a person to start with.
Book Three takes us through Dick's fall - he starts drinking more, becoming more and more disrespectful to his friends, and has much more of a disregard for anyone and anything around him. Nicole, on the other hand, is becoming stronger. It's almost as if they have one supply of energy and if one is strong, the other is weak. It just feels like the energy has now shifted and Nicole is coming out on top. At the end, it's all about Nicole, and Dick just sort of fades away.
This is only the second Fitzgerald book I have read, and yet, it's obviously by him. His style is very bouncy. While the sentences themselves are easy to read, you fly along (as if at a party) enjoying the cadence of it all, to realize that he has shifted gears and you have no idea what has just happened. I found myself rereading on several occasions as a result so that I could try to grasp the storyline.
There is also a personal connection to this story - apparently, Fitzgerald's wife was schitzophrenic, and he is also claimed to have had an affair with a Hollywood actress. Thus, while this is a work of fiction, I'm sure for the author, it was much more than that, and may have accounted for the darker elements of the story often overtaking the lighter parts.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It took a long time for me to actually get through Tender is the Night...it ended up not being such a dreadful read as I thought it would be from the first section, which is mainly frivolity with rather derogatory remarks about the females in the book wanting to have a man to tell them how to feel, think, and even one in which a woman following a man (her husband) around and losing her own identity is referred to as a trophy.
I've been told by someone dear to me that this is just time period, etc. However, my main feeling is just that good authors rise above that and there were plenty of strong female authors that had been around by that time that for sure demonstrated the ability to think on their own...let's see...Virgina Woolf, Mary Shelley, and of course the Brontë sisters. I digress but you get the idea how incensed I was, right? I wanted to tear apart the book from cover to cover. To make it worse, the main character also makes quite a few racial remarks that are again perhaps passed off as "sign of the times" but still got under my skin quite a bit.
That said, the other thing that really stinks about the first part is how nauseatingly formulaic it is. The plot is incredibly predictable...naive young actress from Hollywood travels to France, wants to learn the ways of love through an older man (male protagonist) who happens to also be married. It literally sickened me to read in pretty much every way imaginable. For the most part, the beginning section is drivel.
Where the book grows interesting is towards the middle and end as it speaks more about aging and losing all of your charms and friends...of the mental insanity of one of the female characters and, in some ways, even a process of giving up and losing control. Then, losing life's meaning and drifting away into a nothingness. It's the opposite of frivolity and if were rated alone, would be given a 4/5 (the first section more like a 2/5 stars) No, this later part may be incredibly depressing but it seems to have relevance that carries weight in a timeless sense that almost makes the initial suffering worthwhile.
Oh and as a side note, though this is only a minor spoiler...it was a very strange read for me coming from upstate NY...the male protagonist is from Buffalo, NY originally and refers to this a few times...at the end, he actually ends up in the town where I was born: Hornell, NY which has a population of about 15 people, including the fictional character.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beautiful writing and evocative of a time and place. The narrative was disjointed and went on for too long. i never built much empathy for the characters. Fitzgerald excels in shorter fiction but becomes unfocused in longer works such as this one.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Really mixed feelings about this one! Was a re-read from approx 20 years ago, and my memory (hazy) is that I thought WOW at the time. This time, I just didn't actually get it really. Was quite pleased just to get to the end. Shame, as I suppose my expectations were high, and they were dashed. Hate not finishing a book so forced myself through it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enjoyable to me because partly set in the place where I live, and other places with which I am familiar such as Cannes, Nice, Monaco... in the 1920s and how different from now! The story of Dick and Nicole Diver, their meeting and marriage, the irruption of a beautiful young movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt, 1920s expat American high society. "No one goes to the Riviera in summer". Some things made me smile and wonder, such as the cheese fondue in Gstaad, "an indigestible kind of Welsh rarebit" served with mulled red wine, is that possible? (I am quoting from memory so maybe not the exact words). And I did not understand why characters in Zug/Zürich are addressed in French (German is spoken there). Some passages are beautifully written; this is much better than The Last Tycoon or This Side of Paradise.While I think, I would like to say that although this is an elegantly bound collection with its gorgeous Bickford-Smith covers,and the paper satisfyingly thick, the actual printing is shoddy, so uneven, with thick blotchy passages interspersed with faint ones, broken lettering: I can't understand how these were printed. There is a tedious list of variant spellings at the end (Scott Fitzgerald's corrections) largely concerning hyphenation, capitalization and French accents. Rather than this I would have preferred a proper editing job, correcting typos such as filigree rather than filagree, etc.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From the book description: "Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise."Tender is the Night is about loving as an act of faith, the kind of long term loving that involves taking in all the flaws of your lover and absorbing them until two people merge into a gentle and vulnerable intimacy. Apparently, the story is grew from Fitzgerald's own experiences with loving Zelda, which can definitely be seen in the tender, bruised way the story is approached. I never appreciated Fitzgerald's writing while reading Gatsby in school, but his style is crisp and clean, the kind of writing that bring physical and emotional vividness without belaboring the point (so, I'm definitely going to have to try Gatsby again). Though sorrowful, there's a sweetness to this book as well, the way one nostalgically looks back on a rough and hurtful memory with a smile.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night shows a steep decline in quality from his earlier books. Gone is the perfection of expression so readily on display in The Great Gatsby; gone also is the sense of true tragedy (and this is another tragedy from Fitzgerald, make no mistake), the vivid characterization, and the intuitive sense of plot and pace. Where Fitzgerald was a growing artist in his first two books, showing characters that were both snobby and satisfying, here he seems to have lost the thread of those works and instead opted for characters painted exclusively in beige. I don't know whether it was the tremendous amount of time he took between Gatsby and this book, the purported alcoholic binges, or the mental decline of his wife, but never before has an artist showed such a stark dimming of talent than here. The first section is some of the worst writing in Fitzgerald's entire career as a novelist.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The scene is the French Riviera and the Swiss Alps in the 1920s and 30s. Amidst the frivolous world of European resorts and clinics, the marriage of a glamorous Upper-class American couple slowly disintegrates. They suffer from Bad Nerves, alcoholism, and dysfunctional families, and eventually realize that Money Can't Buy Happiness.Some brilliantly poetic passages interspersed with bland pedestrian psychology.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I really didn't have a particularly strong reaction to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" -- I really didn't love it or hate it... reading it didn't really impact me in any way. (I had expected to love it, having read and enjoyed "The Great Gatsby" many times.)The novel is the story of the Divers, a wealthy American couple, who spend time with a glittering crowd on the French Riviera, including a 19-year old actress named Rosemary Hoyt. It has all the hallmarks of the 1920's era lifestyle of fabulous parties and interesting characters wandering around alcohol soaked rooms. I especially liked "Book 1" of the story, but as the novel moved on it felt a bit rambling and disjointed. Not all of the pieces seemed to meld together. Perhaps this is because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this over nine years and included bits and pieces of other half-started novels before settling on this particular story. Overall, I just found this book to be "okay."
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Heavy going but beautifully written in parts. Slightly rambling and disjointed.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ese es mi deseo por favor y comprensión y disculpas solo quisiera confirmar mi asistencia.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Great Gatsby was my first foray into the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald.I read Tender is the Night imediately upon finishing the Great Gatsby. I can't say how disappointed I am in both.I can see that possibly this was a completely new type of story in the 1930's but, regardless, I am mystified at why Fitzgerald is considered such a great author. I find the writing stilted and strange. I find the stories almost pointless and the characters without any merit at all!
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5an unusual winding tale that begins with great fourish and detail and has a non-ending tinged with hollow sadness, interesting in a historical sense ... wealthy americans in Europe in the 20's ... but left me feeling let down
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I’ll be frank - I didn’t think I would care for this book. Fitzgerald spent nine years writing it and by the time it was published in 1934, America was in the throes of the Great Depression; to read of the wealthy in the south of France at this time seemed in some way a little wrong to me. Hemingway’s praise of Fitzgerald’s talent while at the same time describing the chaos of his life and marriage to Zelda (see “A Moveable Feast”) did not further enamor me to the man, however, with all of that said, I decided to give “Tender is the Night” a shot.I was pleasantly surprised. The book could have used a little editing and tightening up in the beginning as well as the end, but if you wrestle with it early, I recommend patience. There are a lot of powerful themes here. The plot is not told linearly and it unfolds over the book (stop reading here if you don’t want to know more), but simply put, Dick Diver is a psychologist who has fallen in love with Nicole, the “scarcely saved waif of disaster”, a wealthy patient who is erratic and not completely mentally stable. Obviously Fitzgerald relies heavily on his own tortured marriage here. Dick marries Nicole and the two lead the life of rich socialites, but beneath the surface, in addition to the wear of being both a husband and a doctor to her, the thrill is gone. Enter Rosemary, an eighteen year old Hollywood actress, who quickly falls in love with Dick, despite the age gap and his marital status. Along the way it is revealed that Nicole’s mental instability stems from sexual abuse she suffered as a child by her own father; Fitzgerald does not dwell on this, alluding to it on a single page, but it is all the more powerful and heartbreaking as a result. Despite not being able to leave his wife and commit to the younger girl, Dick is tortured by jealousy over her, as she is just coming into her own and blooming in life. Fitzgerald makes great use of recurring, haunting inner dialogue that Dick imagines Rosemary to have had with other lovers when reminded of her at odd moments (“Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?”). Occasionally the dialogue and phrasing of eighty years ago brings a little smile (“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent – things get difficult.”), but the feelings and emotions usually ring true, and the interplay between Dick and the women in his life is always interesting (“Come and sit on my lap close to me”, he said softly, “and let me see about your lovely mouth.”).While Nicole and Rosemary both get stronger over the course of time, Dick degenerates into alcoholism and regret over both loves. From seeming to have it all to not living up to his full potential, and fading out into obscurity … clearly one of Fitzgerald’s own fears, and perhaps the fear of many. Thumbs up.Quotes:On death:“…thinking first that old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?”On love:“She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at least she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.”“Again the names – then they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast…They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.”“He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.”I love this one:“Walking in the garden when it was quite dark he thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self. He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.‘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.’”As well as this one, on love reunited as well as May-December romances:“He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged – the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve the relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all that might attract her – it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.”On pain:“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.”On parenting, and the dangers of over-protectiveness:“The father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to protect a nervous brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from developing powers of adjustment to life’s inevitable surprises.”On simplicity:“’You know, you’re a little complicated after all.’‘Oh no,’ she assured him hastily. ‘No, I’m not really – I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.’”On war, this after WWI and how ironic that WWII was a handful of years away:“’See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward from behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.’”On women:“Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as ‘cruelty.’ So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch.”On writing for the masses:“Soon you will be writing little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,’ so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking.”Lastly a bit of humor; the character of Abe North is funny:“Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: ‘Of course I’ve got one,’ he insisted, ‘- a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.’”
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When we first meet Dick and Nicole Diver, a glamorous married couple living a life of leisure in the south of France, we know nothing about who they truly are. We see them only through the eyes of Rosemary, a young actress who becomes completely infatuated with them. As she falls for Dick, we see the story begin to spiral towards disaster, but we aren’t quite sure what’s going to happen. The second section of the book takes us back to the beginning of the story. We learn how Dick, a psychoanalyst, met Nicole because she was his patient. I think this is essential for the success of the story, because it’s important for the reader to understand that Dick knew what he was getting into when he married her. I didn’t become completely attached to the book until that second section. I need the back story in order to feel anything but distant interest in the characters. Once I was hooked I couldn’t looked away from the doomed love story. I’ve read The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and most of Fitzgerald’s short stories, but this one has a level of rawness and beauty that really struck a chord with me. Some of the lines are just so lovely. For example, read the following and just try to tell me that isn’t the most eloquent way to say that someone liked to look in the mirror… “He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself.” This novel was so fascinating because it’s so autobiographical. Fitzgerald talks about Dick drinks too much and Nicole “ruins” his genius and ambition. These are elements seem to come directly from his own life. That’s exactly how Hemingway described what Zelda did you F. Scott. It’s strange to think about writing a book that’s clearly a thinly veiled reference to your own dysfunctional life. Apparently there are two versions of this book. The original was published in 1934, while Fitzgerald was alive. The revised version was created by a friend of Fitzgerald’s, Malcolm Cowley, using the author’s notes. It was published in 1951. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s strange to think of multiple versions of the same book being out there. A few elements seem to spring from nowhere, but maybe I just missed something. There were a few references to Lanier and Topsy and at first I didn’t realize that they were their children. Also, their alcoholic friend Abe North’s story seemed to peter off until he only merited a mention later. Regardless, it is full of more brilliance than anything else. The writing completely captured me and in the end, that makes the book well worth reading. I think this may be my favorite Fitzgerald novel because it helps explain the tragedy of his own life. “There were other letters among whose helpless caesuras lurked darker rhythms.” “I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.” – Nicole “A schizophene is well named as a split personality ¬– Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going.”
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I couldn't muster the tiniest about of sympathy for these characters; rich, self-involved characters who lazily make terrible decisions that will ruin their lives don't entice or interest me. I'd be more specific, but would hate to ruin the story in case someone else actually enjoys it. But I am certainly not one of those people.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perfect summer re-reading, since I couldn't get to the Riviera myself. I still love this book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Very well written, although I thought the plot meanders alot and ends a bit flat.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A screwed up story about a bunch of people with almost unlimited resources who somehow seem deprived of the sense they were born with. I was so happy when it ended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I started reading this on Mar 10, 1952, and described it that day as eminently readable. On Mar 11 I called it a tour de force, and said it was by far the best I'd read of Fitzgerald's work. Of course I draw morals from the story: the unhappiness of wealth, the dangers of weak-willedness in regard to liquor. I thought the author a little weak when dealing with the actual exhibition of mental illness and its manifestation, but he is superb when dealing with the bored, the distressed, and the frenzied. He is wonderful at depicting social embarrassment, and the after effects. He is on such sure ground I tthink mainly because he lived the kind of life he did. He stands out in in his novels--he is much more obvious--because he lived at a full, riotous, and crazy pace and so endured so much. This is the best novel I've read so far this year.. I finsihd the book on March 12 and said the ending was weak but suitable.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tender is the Night surpasses the more popular Great Gatsby. The book again is autobiographical in nature, with Nicole, the wife of the main character Dick, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's real-life wife Zelda. The external appearance of happiness created by the rich life lived on the French Riviera covers Nicole's psychological difficulties and Dick's attempts to live only on the surface due to his inability to continue coping with Nicole's problems. In spite of her psychiatric malfunctions, I found Nicole relatable and appealing and Dick's efforts equally interesting and likeable. This book has become one of my all-time favorites and I highly recommend it!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dick Diver, whom Fitzgerald introduces through the implied point of view of Rosemary, a young Hollywood starlet, resembles the author's more renowned and equally enigmatic creation, Gatsby. Except Dick actually does something we can get a handle on: he's a doctor who knows a few things about psychology, one with a few blind spots about his own makeup. When we begin to see Dick's vulnerabilities, and the Gatsby-like underpinning of his backstory, Tender Is the Night takes flight.The same can be said Dick's wife, Nicole, a character drawn from on Fitzgerald's problematic real-life partner, Zelda. A formidable woman, as seen by Rosemary, the young ingenue, Nicole too is psychically fleshed out as the perfect couple begin to flounder. A head case of a different sort than Dick, she is in her own way as enigmatic.The two of them lead the high life on the French Riviera, in Paris and in Switzerland. Money, and the society that takes it for granted, supplies the setting, the travel, the hotel rooms at the Ritz and skiing vacations in Gstaad. But psychology, of course, is another matter. Money won't buy happiness in that realm, which we discover is not quite Dick's sinecure, that in fact he sees himself a kept man as the effect he has on those around him wanes--though his acuity remains intact--and as Nicole begins to assert herself.Tender Is the Night has much in common with its predecessor, This Side of Paradise, as well as Gatsby. In the latter, however, Fitzgerald put it all together, moving beyond the subjective inconsistencies of the privileged class and its assumptions about which he was both acutely aware but as a writer occasionally shorthand. Nevertheless, his struggle to define his protagonists is there in all the books, and makes this one a worthwhile read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the best works of American literature ever, "Tender is the Night" is often overlooked due to the popularity of Fitzgerald more well known work, "The Great Gatsby." In my opinion, great works of American literature are ones that simultaneously capture the time in which they are set, and perfectly arc these struggles and triumphs to wider, common themes. Somewhat reflective of his own life, Tender tells the story of a psychiatrist who pulls a reverse Florence Nightingale and falls for one his is patients before she's truly better. The resultant relationship is less than perfect, but he struggles with duty to his vows, and the longings of his heart when a new interest- scandalous in her own way- makes her way on his scene. As always, reading Fitzgerald is like watching an author make slow, passionate love to the dictionary. He' brilliant with words, but not hifalutin like many of his contemporaries. What he tells is a captivating bittersweet tale of confusions and conflict, set against a beautiful backdrop of pain, joy and strife.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is one of those rare books that I would have given up on if I was a quitter. I found the writing style hard going, confusing and just generally awful. If this is the norm for Fitzgerald I think I will stop here.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's taken me a long time to get around to this review. Truth is, I still can't find interesting to say about it. After reading The Great Gatsby, I became an instant fan of Fitzergarld’s, which is why I picked up this book. But the style I found so enchanting in TGG quickly became cloying this time around, and furthermore I didn’t connect with any of the characters or their experiences in this story, even though they are faced with issues, such as mental health problems, which normally touch me in some ways. This book had it's moments, but it's safe to say that had I started with Tender is the Night first, it would have given me a much less favourable impression of Fitzgerald's great talent. More tedious than enjoyable, but still glad I added it to my repertoire. Three stars because no matter what, you can't deny his genius as a writer.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have to admit that I did not finish this book. I read 161 pages of 313 pages. I found the characters superficial and devoid of morality. That said, you would think that would draw a reader in but I found the book rather boring.
Book preview
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
INTRODUCTION
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), is a novel of tragic convergence. Over the course of the story, the principal characters, with their varied histories and conflicting aspirations, are moving slowly but surely toward one another. When they finally gather in a stifling
room of the Plaza Hotel for an intimate party on a hot summer day, their troubled interrelationships boil over into a full-scale confrontation, setting in motion the book’s disastrous conclusion. In Tender Is the Night (published nearly ten years later), Fitzgerald revisits the socioeconomic milieu of Gatsby, but in a manner that is more intricate, more intriguing, and, in many ways, more rewarding; and he does so by inverting the earlier book’s convergent structure, crafting instead a novel of tragic entropy.
To begin, Fitzgerald carefully constructs an oasis of time and place. The setting is a resort town on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera
where the Mediterranean Sea—enclosed by the landmasses of Europe and Africa—ensures a mild and forgiving climate. The time is 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War and four years before the onset of the Great Depression. The month is June, two months after the region’s regular vacationers have returned to their harried lives in London and Paris. Thus, both geographically and temporally the story begins at a comfortable distance from inclement weather and worldly events.
Within this congenial setting, on a quiet beach, a small group of expatriates are drawn together by Dick Diver, a charismatic and self-possessed man of thirty-four. The eleven characters—Dick and his wife Nicole, Abe and Mary North, Albert and Violet McKisco, Mrs. Abrams, Messrs. Barban, Campion, and Dumphry, and the starlet Rosemary Hoyt—appear, at first glance, to be a ragtag ensemble. Variously, they are older and younger, married and single, heterosexual and gay, arrived and aspiring. But we quickly realize that the individuals are more alike than not. They are mostly white Americans between the ages of twenty and forty who can afford a Mediterranean jaunt, and who share a similar sense of sophistication, whether they have attained it yet, or not. So, while they may not all know each other, we get the sense that it would take ten minutes of conversation for any two of them to find someone they know in common.
Most important, what the cast shares is a state of refined liberty. They are free from the dangers and hardships of the war era. Thanks to their financial wherewithal, they have the luxury of not working (Dick is taking an extended holiday from psychiatry, Rosemary from acting, Abe from composing, and Albert from writing). And thanks to the strength of the postwar dollar, they are free from most of life’s inconveniences, their daily necessities seen to by anonymous intermediaries—the bartenders, bellboys, chauffeurs, cooks, concierges, gardeners, maids, nannies, stewards, valets, and waiters who populate the novel like a shadow cast of characters.
Dick invites the ensemble for dinner at his and Nicole’s home, the Villa Diana. There, they sit at a candlelit table at the edge of a beautiful garden overlooking the Mediterranean—an oasis within an oasis within an oasis. But as this cozy party draws to a close, Fitzgerald initiates a narrative of dissolution that is as relentless as it is thorough.
Having begun in its protected little corner of the Mediterranean, the novel starts skipping across nations, touching down in various cities of France, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. Similarly, having begun as a day-by-day account, the plot takes off on a dizzying journey across time. After describing a few weeks in 1925, Fitzgerald turns the clock back, but he does not simply revisit a specific moment to ground and inform his tale. Rather, having described an encounter with Dick and Nicole in 1919, he recedes further to when they first met in 1917, and then further still to the unsettling events of Nicole’s childhood. Once the narrative catches up to itself in the present,
it does not resume its initial leisurely pace. It advances in fits and starts, carefully detailing a few hours in one chapter and dispensing with whole years in another.
By leaping from setting to setting and period to period, Fitzgerald gives readers some taste of the disorientation that the characters experience in their lives. As the chapters progress, the eleven who were gathered at the Divers’ table become increasingly far-flung, their socioeconomic standings shuffled, friendships strained, romantic pairings broken, and individual egos either tested or dismantled.
As the novel unfolds, Fitzgerald makes it clear that the most damning forces of dissolution in our lives come from within. He suggests that the very liberties that secure our idlest hours can dissociate us from life by distancing us from meaningful experiences, weakening our emotional bonds, and undermining our sense of self.
Fitzgerald establishes this theme early, calling into question the authenticity of his characters’ experiences by describing their carefree actions in theatrical terms. At the Divers’ party, the Villa Diana is referred to as a stage,
while the dinner table is a mechanical dancing platform
and the Divers are like charming figures in a ballet.
Later that night when Rosemary comes upon Campion weeping, she touches him on the shoulder after recalling a scene in a rôle she had played.
Thus, while the characters’ stay on the Riviera may be colorful and entertaining, Fitzgerald suggests it has the substance of a charade.
Throughout the opening chapters there is often music playing, but it is almost always in the distance. At one point, Rosemary hears mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets,
at another she hears from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ,
and then dance music from somewhere in the hills behind the hotel.
Like the theatrical language, the recurrence of the distant music gives us a nagging impression that the real celebration of life is happening not in the Divers’ cozy sphere but somewhere else altogether.
Fitzgerald emphasizes the theme of dissociation in his descriptions of the Divers. As Dick plans his dinner party, he looks out at Cannes through a telescope, then announces the guest list to Nicole over a megaphone (much as later he will look at an historic battlefield through a periscope and field glasses). For all Dick’s joie de vivre, Fitzgerald suggests that our protagonist often stands at some remove from life. Nicole can be seen walking through her garden wearing an artificial camellia on her shoulder
and a lilac scarf,
her costume flowers clashing, in a way, with the organic ones in abundance around her. A moment later, she listens to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house,
at once free from the inconveniences of parenthood (thanks to the governess), but strikingly aloof from the concerns of her children, who are almost as invisible in this novel as the servants.
As noted, the principal male characters have the liberty of not working, but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear that they are ambivalent about their idleness, often speaking of the work they’re not doing in defensive terms. In American culture, one is closely identified with one’s profession, so an extended hiatus can undermine one’s sense of self, especially when, as in Dick’s case, the hiatus is paid for with the wife’s inherited wealth.
While the Divers were spared the harsher realities of the war (spending its culminating years in the safety of Switzerland), Fitzgerald implies that this stroke of good fortune has lead to a certain frivolousness. He does so by invoking military imagery to describe the couple in contexts that could not be less warlike. Dick sometimes looks back on the parties he has given as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered.
When Nicole arrives at an Italian train station, her management of a mountain of luggage was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply officer.
And when the couple attends a dance during a ski trip, the footwork of the crowd is as thunderous as spurred boots in war.
Fitzgerald highlights the Divers’ comfortable distance from the realities of war when, heading north, they visit the trenches of Beaumont-Hamel as tourists, and Dick schools Abe on elements of military history despite the fact that Abe is the one who actually saw combat.
Once the characters settle in Paris, their gay itinerary of dining, shopping, and romancing is interrupted by two homicidal acts. On a train platform, they see an acquaintance shoot her presumed paramour twice with a revolver. Then, as if nothing had happened, the lives of the Divers and their friends flowed into the street.
Shortly thereafter, an Afro-European with whom Abe has become acquainted is stabbed in the Divers’ hotel and dies on Rosemary’s bed. Having coordinated the quiet removal of the body, Dick assures Rosemary you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some nigger scrap.
In both cases, the characters betray their callousness by showing utter indifference to the victims, focusing instead on how unsettled or inconvenienced they are by the turn of events.
Over the course of the novel, the forces of entropy take their toll on various characters, but especially on Dick. In the late 1920s, Dick attempts to resurrect his career and his marriage by buying into a Swiss clinic with his wife’s money, a venture that proves to be too little too late. Deeply dissatisfied, Dick lies to Nicole and his partner that he is headed to a psychological conference, and instead goes on a private holiday. Here, Fitzgerald crafts a riveting crescendo of dissolution in which many of the novels central motifs are revisited to harrowing effect.
Continuing the pattern of geographic dislocation, Dick sets off on a whirlwind tour, traveling from Zürich to Munich, Innsbruck, New York, Virginia, and Naples until finally arriving in Rome—all in a matter of ten pages.
On this journey, characters from the 1925 dinner reappear like ghosts, each highlighting some manner in which our protagonist has failed in his life. In Munich, Dick runs into Tommy Barban in a bar. You’ve been touring?
Dick asks. Yes, we have been touring,
Tommy responds, ironically. For in fact, he has just returned from Communist Russia where he has fought members of the Red Guard in order to rescue a prince. If this stinging reminder of his lack of service were not enough, on the following morning Dick is woken by the sound of marching feet, which turns out to be a long column of men in uniform, wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in frock coats and silk hats, burghers, aristocrats, plain men,
in a word, men.
The veterans, presumably, have earned the right to be mournful, having lost comrades in the heat of battle, but it is Dick who bursts into tears—over the loss of his own youth.
While in the bar with Tommy, Dick is visited by a second ghost—the ghost of Abe North. In a cavalier discussion, Tommy reveals that the witty alcoholic composer-who-no-longer-composes has been beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. Exhibiting the same indifference to victims of violence that Dick and Nicole had shown earlier, Tommy and his friend argue whether it was the Racquet Club or the Harvard Club to which the beaten Abe crawled with his final breaths.
Dick’s holiday is briefly interrupted when he must travel to America to bury his father. Staring at the familiar names in the family plot, Dick realizes he had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back,
his decade abroad having left him without a home or a country.
On the ship back to Europe, Dick runs into Albert McKisco, the third ghost from the Villa Diana dinner. While in 1925 McKisco was a pretentious young man of letters, he has achieved wealth and fame as a novelist on a foundation of self-respect.
By contrast, Dick’s halfhearted return to his profession by means of his wife’s money has left him feeling swallowed up like a gigolo.
Upon arriving in Rome, at the luxurious Hotel Quirinale, Dick is visited by the fourth and final ghost, Rosemary Hoyt—the young woman who had adored him just a few years before. At long last, the two consummate their relationship, but the act of union leaves Dick with a sense of loss rather than attainment. A mutual acquaintance points out that Rosemary is now a woman of the world.
The acquaintance means this in the salacious sense, but Rosemary has, in fact, become a woman of the world. Like McKisco, she has used the intervening years to advance her career and her fame, and while in Rome, she has phone calls, professional appointments, and social engagements that take priority over her former infatuation. Thus, one by one, the ghosts of Dick’s past show him all that he has not become: not a man of courage, not a professional success, not a faithful husband, not an irresistible lover. Or to put it more simply, in the parlance of the times, not a man.
Shaken, Dick goes on a bender, drinking heavily in a basement cabaret. The music is now in the foreground, but it is a listless band
playing the exaggerated strains of the tango. Where Dick once seemed the charming personification of cosmopolitanism, he now exhibits a casual racism, attacking the British and Italian people with sweeping, ugly assessments. Boorishly, he elbows his way into someone else’s date, dances with the young woman drunkenly, then is shocked when she suddenly disappears.
Having long benefited from the help of anonymous intermediaries, Dick has become condescending in their company. Calling over the Negro bandleader, Dick quickly offends him in an argument over money. Slurring his words, he stumbles into the night and gets into another row over money, this time with a group of taxi drivers. They all go to a police station to resolve the dispute, where Dick has one last ill-fated encounter with the servile class, punching a leering
observer who turns out to be a plainclothes lieutenant. At long last, the violence that Dick has been accustomed to witnessing with a cavalier indifference, visits itself upon him in full fury. Sitting in a prison cell with a broken nose, cracked ribs, and a closed eye, Dick has no choice but to pursue a final emasculating act: asking his wife’s sister to bail him out. The great unraveling has begun, and in the pages that follow the finely colored threads of Dick’s tapestry will be pulled apart without remedy or recourse.
For all its poetic beauty and mythic resonance, The Great Gatsby is fundamentally a novel of the imagination—a tidy parable that has been crafted with great care and economy. By contrast, Tender Is the Night is a novel of experience. While exhibiting Fitzgerald’s prodigious talents—his elegant writing, his command of human psychology, and his nuanced sense of society—Tender is also sprawling, complicated, chaotic, and very, very personal. It is no coincidence that the events in the book begin just two months after Gatsby was published. In Tender we find not how Fitzgerald imagines the world might be, but how he experienced it firsthand. I suspect that even those unfamiliar with the details of Fitzgerald’s biography can sense a moral immediacy. To watch in slow motion as Dick Diver’s alluring liberties betray him, we feel the pain of his diminishment at every step, and we leave his story with a greater reverence for the quotidian responsibilities that bind us more closely to life.
—Amor Towles
TENDER IS THE NIGHT
BOOK ONE
I
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.
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 sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.
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 eyes 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 high 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.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:
Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.
I want to go home anyhow,
the girl answered.
They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact—moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.
We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll wire right away for steamer tickets.
At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone verandah that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated—it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.
Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.
As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.
I say—they have sharks out behind the raft.
He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe-Juan.
Heavens!
exclaimed Rosemary.
They come in for the refuse from the flotte.
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink.
Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth—the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.
Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as that North guy
had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.
Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of sea-weed in the sand. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late.
After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list.
The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.
You are a ripping swimmer.
She demurred.
Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.
Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.
Mrs. Abrams—Mrs. McKisco—Mr. McKisco—Mr. Dumphry—
We know who you are,
spoke up the woman in evening dress. You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.
They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly good sports
preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.
We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,
she continued cheerily, "because your skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind."
II
We thought maybe you were in the plot,
said Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character—practically the assistant hero.
The plot?
inquired Rosemary, half understanding. Is there a plot?
"My dear, we don’t know, said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman’s chuckle.
We’re not in it. We’re the gallery."
Mr. Dumphry, a tow-headed, effeminate young man, remarked: Mama Abrams is a plot in herself,
and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying: Now, Royal, don’t be too ghastly for words.
Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.
Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not find the topic of the plot
amusing. He had been staring at the sea—now after a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:
Been here long?
Only a day.
Oh.
Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the others.
Going to stay all summer?
asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. If you do you can watch the plot unfold.
For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!
exploded her husband. Get a new joke, for God’s sake!
Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed audibly:
He’s nervous.
I’m not nervous,
disagreed McKisco. It just happens I’m not nervous at all.
He was burning visibly—a greyish flush had spread over his face, dissolving all his expressions into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity Rosemary followed.
Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began a stiff-armed batting of the Mediterranean, obviously intended to suggest a crawl—his breath exhausted he arose and looked around with an expression of surprise that he was still in sight of shore.
I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.
He looked at Rosemary inquiringly.
I think you breathe out under water,
she explained. And every fourth beat you roll your head over for air.
The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?
The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly, whereupon the man started up and pulled her on board.
I was afraid it hit you.
His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheek-bones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs. McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.
Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. When he had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.
He’s a good swimmer,
Rosemary said.
Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.
Well, he’s a rotten musician.
She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft, and having attained his balance was trying to make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only an extra stagger. I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.
Yes,
agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.
Antheil’s my man.
Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly to Rosemary, Antheil and Joyce. I don’t suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America.
I wish I had a cigarette,
said McKisco calmly. That’s more important to me just now.
He’s got insides—don’t you think so, Albert?
Her voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.
Is that his wife?
Rosemary asked.
No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.
Her eyes, photographic, did not move from the woman’s face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.
Have you been abroad before?
Yes—I went to school in Paris.
Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. What do these people get out of it?
She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. They just stick around with each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.
I should think so.
My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.
Rosemary said: Oh, he is?
She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.
It’s on the idea of Ulysses,
continued Mrs. McKisco. Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age—
Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,
protested McKisco. I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.
Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas—she gathered that some one was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that umbrella and turned toward it—and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.
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.
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.
She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:
I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.
Thank you.
Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs. Heavens!
She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
Do you know what time it is?
Rosemary asked.
It’s about half-past one.
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
It’s not a bad time,
said Dick Diver. It’s not one of the worst times of the day.
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.
III
It was almost two when they went into the dining room. Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them a tired version of the table d’hôte luncheon.
I fell in love on the beach,
said Rosemary.
Who with?
First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.
Did you talk to him?
Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.
She was eating, ravenously. He’s married though—it’s usually the way.
Her mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She had no personal bitterness or resentments about life—twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing