Amongst my friends, even the ones who read a lot, it’s commonly assumed that F Scott Fitzgerald was a tremendously popular writer during his time. He was not. Only his first book, This Side of Paradise, was a bestseller; even that didn’t crack the top ten of the year. (By way of comparison, Hemingway made the top ten four times before he passed.) His next book, The Beautiful and the Damned, performed well by his standards, selling somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 copies in 1922. But that was meager compared to the biggest books of the year, which sold (roughly) between 100,000 and 400,000 copies in the first year alone.
If you take a look at that list, however, you’ll realize that nearly all of the titles and their authors have since been forgotten. When Fitzgerald was dying, he assumed the same fate for himself. He was not being melodramatic; all the evidence pointed in that direction. When his corpse was still warm, the few critics who bothered to write his obituary declared him an alcoholic who’d squandered his talent.
But then Hitler stepped in. He started going berserk in Europe, and the US government began distributing The Great Gatsby to troops, gratis. The work had sold fewer than 25,000 copies during the author’s lifetime, but the soldiers took such a strong liking to it that Uncle Sam sent them over 150,000. From hell on Earth, Fitzgerald transported them to dreamy East and West Egg. Jay Gatsby helped them forget, for a little while, that their friends’ faces were getting blown off. Daisy Buchanon, with that blue thong showing through her white linens, gave them something to hope for.
There’s another thing to thank those heroes for: their taste. Clearly, it was superior to the paid pedants who scorned Fitzgerald’s work and dismissed him as an ephemeral writer of the Jazz Age, sure to pass into the abyss with the period.
But the opinion of the literary critic—save for a select few—has never been worth much. Judging by the modern commentator today, it never will be. He is worse than his predecessors. His mushy brain is more scattered, and his palate is less-refined. He spends his days scrolling Twitter, two fingers in the hurricane, keeping tabs on what is in vogue and updating his beliefs in real-time through tremendous feats of doublethink. Corrupted by identity politics, he tends to be as dogmatic as his publication is ideological. If a steaming pile has the right mix of brown and black and white, he will lie down on his Brooklyn carpet and sniff it until he believes it is warm chocolate cake. And if sewage trails the right sort of historically underrepresented characters, he slouches ready to declare it sacred. Just look at the glowing reviews of A Little Life, seven hundred interminable pages of torture porn, lauded because it follows a diverse cast with a sufficient number of homosexuals. Scared of seeming out of touch, its champions must have believed that they needed to—ever so bravely—signal their approval. That might be why one of the few worthwhile reviews came from a gay man: Mendelsohn could write an honest critique without fear of being called a homophobe. I hope that’s the case because the alternative is scarier: they’re so brainwashed that they actually think it’s good.
Now, even more than in Fitzgerald’s era, is not the time to trust the “literary professional.” If there is still courageous quality fiction being written today, they are complicit in gate-keeping it from us. Better to take tips from friends, posts on Reddit, whisperings in certain neighborhoods—as long as they’re at least one mile from Bushwick.
Still, it is unlikely that you will get pointed toward Fitzgerald’s final completed book, Tender is the Night, which floundered its way to 13,000 copies sold upon publication. Unlike The Great Gatsby, however, there hasn’t been a widespread, popular reevaluation. Relatively few have read it today. What a shame. Irwin Shaw regarded it as his “best work”; Hemingway remarked that it “gets better and better”; and the author himself believed it to be his masterpiece.
Fitzgerald started writing the book in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, 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 main characters are, in-part, based on—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. He was stuck.
In 1926 he put the book away and moved his family from Europe to Hollywood where he spent his time failing on film sets. He did, however, take something good from California: Lois Moran, who inspired Rosemary, one of the major characters of the book. But even with his new muse—the one who gave him back a confidence that his unstable wife siphoned—Fitzgerald was only able to complete two chapters in the new direction Moran inspired. With all that he lived, still he could not progress. So Fitzgerald returned to writing mediocre, lucrative short stories for magazines, a practice that Hemingway refers to in A Moveable Feast as “whoring”:
[Fitzgerald] 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.
Thankfully, finally, Fitzgerald’s luck turned in 1929. He moved back to Europe and 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 already diminutive 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.
The plot was heavily autobiographical, and the process of writing it contributed to Fitzgerald’s infamous crack-up. Authors tend to be the sort who either plunder their stories from real episodes or make most of it up; at first glance the choice of which writer to become seems inconsequential, but, as Murakami writes 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’ll start making yourself 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. This Side of Paradise is based closely on his experiences at Princeton; The Beautiful & The Damned on his early relationship with Zelda; The Great Gatsby on his first failed romance as well as his roaring time in New York. 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. 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. He himself says in The Crack-Up 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.”
It is this sense of personified tragedy that stuck with me for months after I finished the book. I have read lots of morose twentieth-century literature, yet Dick Diver was more immediately relatable than other great characters. Take Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage or Lieutenant Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. Over time Maugham and Hemingway narrow the distance to nil between the modern reader and their protagonists; but there was no gap to speak of from where Fitzgerald begins. That’s because—even though I have not been ruined by alcohol or marriage (yet)—I, like many others, have already experienced Dick Diver’s fall repeatedly.
Life, after all, is the inexorable process of shearing ambitions. In youth we want to become an astronaut, then a professional athlete, then something else. Hopefully we will achieve what we finally land on, but, even if we do, we understand the experience of desperately yearning to become someone… and then failing. How many set out to be great partners but blow it up somewhere along the way? How many set out to be the perfect parent, but at sixty their memory is bloated with failings? It is natural to strive for an ideal that, at the beginning, seems within grasp—yet in the end turns out to be unattainable.
There are a variety of factors behind each of these failures, and many of them may be different from the festering marriage and unquenchable addiction that ruined Dick Diver. But the pattern is the same. One believes, wholeheartedly, that things are going to go one way; then, for one reason or another, they go in a different direction. In real life, the realization that we are heading irreversibly off track does not come at once, but often reveals itself right near the end. Fitzgerald conveys this dynamic in Tender is the Night by continuously tossing the reader into the throes of small trifles that are hard to connect to the bigger picture. Then the truth becomes clear at the end, when it is too late to fix anything.
For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film.
The story reminds me of the song Cat’s in the Cradle, both tragedies that wake the audience up to their own lives. They give us the opportunity to reexamine things while we still have time to course correct. Since reading Tender is the Night, I’ve naturally become more aware of when I am in the midst of insidious cycles—the first step to breaking them.
If Dick’s struggle was not, at its core, mundane then the book would not have resonated right away. His disaster is accessible because he is not destroyed by a hard-to-imagine vice, but by a natural normal craving that, eventually, engulfs him. In real life, this is the most common form that tragedy takes. Talented athletes, writers, actors, musicians—by the millions—have failed to reach their potential because of a burning desire that is more powerful than their will to be brave, wise, or disciplined. That desire flares up in the everyday moments that make up life—when the prodigy stays out drinking instead of sleeping—as well as the major moments when he chooses the ostentatious partner over the more harmonious option.
Tender is the Night repeatedly exposes us to both of these cases: Diver blending in with his alcoholic milieu; Diver choosing the sick woman who needs him. The world, because of its laziness and need for simplicity, pins our heroes’ demise on the most visible symptom—drugs for Jim Morrison, women for Tiger Woods—but this novel plunges us down until we get to the cause. There we find the void that Dick is trying to fill, an infinite porous bucket in which he hopes others will pour their love and admiration.
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After the first version of the novel was met with mixed reviews and poor sales, Fitzgerald started believing that the fault of the book was in its chronology. The first version (the standard found in bookstores today) does not follow a linear structure. Rather, it begins in the middle, then goes far back, then moves all the way forward from where it left off. In the revised version, however, Fitzgerald reordered the plot so that it moves through time as we experience it.
The decision to change the sequence appears to have been more of a desperate attempt to make the world appreciate the book rather than a well-thought-out editorial decision. Fitzgerald’s original structure is essential to fully understanding the force that ruined Dick Diver from all dimensions. By starting Book One from Rosemary’s perspective, Fitzgerald renders a truer picture of revered traits: They may appear shiny on the surface, but just as often they are corroded underneath. Dick draws in Rosemary because of how he glows on the beach; then, in Book Two and Three, the author moves us inside where we come to recognize that the very charisma we were made to admire is at the center of his downfall. Though these characteristics are apparent throughout the novel, Fitzgerald explicitly mentions them first in Book Two:
In the dead white hours in Zurich… he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
And then near the end of the novel, in Book Three:
He would have to go fix this thing that he didn’t care a damn about, because it had early become a habit to be loved… On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.
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Somehow I’ve made it this far without mentioning the language, which is as vital to the greatness of the work story as is the depth of psychological understanding. A wordsmith with a dazzling style, Fitzgerald struggled for years to get them right: on his desk there were incalculable drafts that stood one-foot high. Lyrically, this was his attempt at painting the Sistine Chapel.
It was also his attempt to reach the pinnacle of his own form of English. He wrote in reminders to avoid the style of his more popular friend (“Beware Ernest in this scene”; “Now a cheerful scene but remember to avoid Hemmingway”), and he explicitly wrote to him:
I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over—in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that.
Undoubtedly, Fitzgerald was engaging in a struggle against all of the other voices in the world to cement his own, and the Hemingway test proves the work’s singularity: If one tries to attempt the novel’s language for a few paragraphs, he will find that the resulting pastiche is so inextricably tied to the innovator that it comes across as ludicrous and absurd. Just as if I were to write, These beers are big and sometimes very cold, it feels equally absurd to write, He watched her ivory smile unfurl underneath the blue winking stars, and his breath burnt with the acidic taste that whispered that from here he was destined to forever decay. As you can see, the authors themselves are the only people who can pull off their approaches completely, just as only Dalí could paint a Dalí, Van Gogh a Van Gogh. All other attempts quickly become parodies.
Fitzgerald’s unfailing poeticism reminds me of a scene from The Beautiful and the Damned in which Anthony Patch predicts that prose would eat poetry:
“Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that's never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can't go any further—except in the novel, perhaps.”
Tender is the Night supports this claim. Florid metaphors, of which there are hundreds if not thousands, often take two or three passes to fully register. One must prepare himself to read certain passages at the pace of swimming through quicksand. Ten pages at a time might be all one is capable of mustering. That’s fine. Many of those sentences likely took him one hundred attempts to get right—and he was a genius of the first-order.
The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.
If at times the book feels like a struggle, it is undoubtedly worth calling on one’s reserves of persistence. In Fitzgerald’s oeuvre, there may not be a finer work. Trust me. Even though I’m not a soldier, I do not belong to the legions of brainwashed critics either.