The Backstory of Tender is the Night and How It Cracked Fitzgerald Up
On the perils of being a certain type of writer.
Next week I will post an in-depth analysis of the first part of Tender is the Night. Subscribe to receive it.
There’s that famous standard Justice Stewart set for porn when he said, “I know it when I see it.” I don’t think literature is too different. You can look up the definition wherever you like but nothing seems satisfactory. It’s probably better for each of us to just allow it to remain somewhat nebulous—still somehow mostly agreeing—and then allow for the occasional fight in the taxi when we’re driving back from what was supposed to be a quiet dinner—feeling as we should at the end of a good party—and someone calls you insane for saying that the works of J. R. R. Tolkien do not qualify.
But if I was forced to put a definition forth then I’d say that literature is the artistic transcription of human (let’s not even get into the ChatGPT thing) thoughts and feelings. On one side there is the writer who through the process of telling a story—though plots are certainly not required—constructs what we could consider a sculpture. On the other side is the reader who starts off blind and diligently rubs his hands over sentences that reveal the cracks and crevices of another person’s previously dark and mysterious mind. By the end of the story the reader can see.
Of course the sculpture, like all of the good ones, is naked. That might be the most shocking part to the new novelist. He thought he was just telling a story but instead he mentions that he was laughing while watching his friend copulate with a prostitute who might have been missing a limb. The honest—and honesty is a prerequisite to being good—writer has been tricked into revealing himself in the nude. Afraid—the poor bastard tries to cut that scene away, but then he finds his work becoming banal. Desperate—he tries to disappear into the surreal, but then he writes that scene that has something to do with his father’s butt, a Joker card, a restaurant bill…
Oh no, he says to himself, What will my mother and her friends and my friends think of—Oh no, let’s go back to that scene with the prostitute.
It is now that the writer has realized one of the terrifying truths of fiction—each word is a reflective fragment of the author’s mind—but somewhere in the labyrinth he’s likely realized that, even though he must stand naked in front of the reader, he does have an important decision to make when it comes to the plot: He can create most of it from real episodes, or he can make most of it up.
All authors must confront this decision; all novels span this spectrum. On one end there is Of Human Bondage (if you haven’t, please please read it) where Somerset Maugham draws so closely from his past that even he could not clearly distinguish all of its fact from fiction; on the other end there is Kafka on the Shore where nearly every event is untethered from those that actually transpired.
Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. It would not interest me to record the facts, even if I could remember them, of which I have already made a better use.
— Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
Across their oeuvres, writers make different decisions on the amount of direct reality they inject into their stories; but, in many cases, it is easy to place them into two buckets when it comes to the material they use: Those who plunder ravenously from the scenes of their lives, and those who have a predilection for invention. At first glance the choice of which writer to become seems inconsequential, but as Murakami points out in Novelist as a Vocation, there are many perils to the path of the former:
Hemingway was the type of writer who took his strength from his material. This helps explain why he led the type of life he did, moving from one war to another (the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War), hunting big game in Africa, fishing for big fish, falling in love with bullfighting. He needed that external stimulus to write. The result was a legendary life; yet age gradually sapped him of the energy that his experiences had once provided. This is pure conjecture, but my guess is that it helps to explain why Hemingway, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, sank into alcoholism and then took his own life in 1961, at the very height of his fame.
If you choose to be like Hemingway then you’re going to live much of your life like a method actor. Likely you’ll have the beginning of a story in mind, then you will start making yourself more and more into that character while gathering the real experiences you need to adequately tell it. Hunter S Thompson, Graham Greene, Jack London—these writers lived certain lives for the sake of material, and, in turn, the novels they wrote significantly shaped them.
Even a perfunctory examination of F Scott’s Fitzgerald’s bibliography proves that he was this sort of writer even if he was not quite as adventurous: This Side of Paradise is based on his experiences at Princeton; The Beautiful & The Damned on his early relationship with Zelda; and The Great Gatsby on his time in New York during the roaring twenties. More poignantly, perhaps, one sees his desire to draw directly from actual experiences through the anecdotes he never documented: Was he not in search of material when he was spinning perpetually in revolving doors, eating orchid petals one-by-one at the bar, having a taxi driver take him door-to-door from the Ritz in Paris to his home in New York?
Fitzgerald was intent on living a life he could record. He was able to survive his first three books all right. But Tender is the Night—not quite.
In 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, he started writing it with a very different concept in mind than the one he realized when he finished it eight years later. After spending time with Gerald and Sara Murphy—the couple who the Divers are, in-part, modeled on—in Antibes, he came up with the concept of a young man traveling from Hollywood to the French Riviera (Gausse’s hotel, where the book starts, really exists as do most of those characters). There he was set to fall in with American expats and destabilize to the point where he kills his tyrannical mother. After writing five drafts of the novel in two years, however, Fitzgerald found that he could not get it to move. The big boy was stuck.
He put the book away in 1926 and moved his family from Europe to Hollywood where he squandered his time failing on film sets. He did, however, steal something good from his time in California: Lois Moran, who inspired Rosemary, one of the central characters of the book. But, even with his new muse—the one who made him “believe in himself” anew—he was only able to complete two chapters in the direction she inspired. With all that he lived he still could not progress; instead he returned to writing mediocre yet lucrative short stories for magazines, a practice that Hemingway refers to in A Moveable Feast as “whoring”:
He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no harm.
But when Fitzgerald moved back to Europe in 1929 his luck turned. Zelda’s mind crumbled to the point where she tried to kill him, herself, and their nine year-old daughter by attempting to fly their car off of a cliff. Simultaneously, Fitzgerald’s bitter alcoholism flared as his reputation as a writer burnt out. It was after these events that the novelist finally had the material he needed to complete what he considered his masterwork. The forlorn family returned once again to the United States; this time he borrowed money from his agent and editor so that he could dedicate himself to writing seriously. From 1932 to 1933, he locked himself up in a rented estate in Baltimore, near where his wife was hospitalized, and wrote the tragedy of a man dissipating instead of realizing his potential.
I said earlier that writers like Fitzgerald live like method actors, but the reality is more extreme than that. For those on the stage and the screen have the luxury of a clean separation between their personal lives and the roles that they are temporarily playing. What these authors do is closer to writing in-depth affirmations, identifying themselves closely with someone who would do this, would do that, and then they—not their external characters—go do it.
Six years ago I experienced something of the kind when I signed up for the New York City marathon never having run more than three continuous miles. For the first month of my training I would stop in the middle of a run—back aching, legs burning—and decide to walk. But then there was one day, worse than all others, that I kept running. After that moment I don’t think I’ve ever quit on a run because right before I do there is a voice that comes in, almost as if delivered from God, that says: “You are not the type of person who quits.” I bet there’s a similar voice that rings in Musk’s ears when he says, “I don’t ever give up,” or in Tiger’s when he says, “giving up's never in the equation.” My identity flipped from someone who quits on runs to someone who doesn’t.
I am not suggesting that Fitzgerald would not have cracked up without Tender is the Night, but I do believe that the novel reinforced and accelerated his demise. At some point in the years when his world was falling, he started to see himself as Dick Diver, the protagonist who set out to be good, “maybe to be the greatest [] that ever lived,” and instead ends up as the to-be forgotten failure Fitzgerald considered himself at the end of his life—when The Great Gatsby was both a commercial and cultural failure (it was only during World War II when it gained prominence), when his final book sold a meager 12,000 copies, when the few critics who even bothered to write his obituary dismissed him as a failed alcoholic.
(I’ll tell you now that when I first wrote this there were tears, anger at those who scorned his genius, pain not only for him but all those who give all that they can and receive little in return…)
After all it was Fitzgerald himself who recognizes in The Crack-Up—a brooding series of letters he sold to Esquire (how far have our magazines fallen in the modern age?) when no one wanted to touch anything that came from him—that he “had become identified with the objects of [his] horror or compassion”; and it was Hemingway who, after reading Tender is the Night, felt the need to remind him: “Bo, you’re not a tragic character.” If that isn’t heartbreaking I don’t know what is.
For a while I used to wonder what it would be like to meet my heroes on the days of their deaths—to understand that despite the greatness of their art most of them failed in more important ways, to kill them off in one final swoop, to know the full extent of tragedy—but after reading Tender is the Night this wish went away. Unlike his friend who died playing the broken hero, Fitzgerald’s last role was to play tragedy itself. He captured it in all of its essence, went into the deepest chambers of psychology, came out to write it in the best language English can produce. No it is not an easy read but a painfully illuminating one; the greatest book I’ve ever read with the challenge to match.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to analyze it as well as I can. If you’d like to read along it would be great if you…