Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (42 page)

Both Dick and Rosemary are more excited by
hearing
about each other’s sex life than by experiencing it. When lunching in the Parisian restaurant with the Divers, Rosemary overhears Dick expressing his sexual desire for Nicole and arranging a time to make love to her. Involving herself in their secret intimacy, Rosemary “stood breathless” in response to Nicole’s orgasmic “gasping sigh,” and feels an unidentified but profound current of emotion pulsing through her virginal body.

A few chapters later Dick also feels a throb of jealousy as his imaginative reconstruction of reality becomes more powerful than reality itself. Rosemary’s Southern boyfriend Collis Clay excites Dick’s imagination by describing an incident in which Rosemary and another young boyfriend, Bill Hillis, had locked themselves in a train compartment and had “some heavy stuff going on” before they were interrupted by an angry train conductor. Though this love scene is
twice
removed, since both Clay and Hillis stand between Dick and Rosemary, Dick becomes emotionally distraught. He vividly pictures the “hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.” Dick then invents a scenario in which Hillis uses and Rosemary acquiesces in an old seducer’s ruse: “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” “Please do. It’s too light in here.”
¹²
This motif recurs throughout the rest of the novel.

When Dick finally consummates his affair with Rosemary in Rome, he discovers that his lack of real feeling for her actually increases his desire and his jealousy. This experience also reminds him of his far deeper love for Nicole, “a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye. . . . Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.” When Rosemary no longer loves him, his vanity is hurt and he characteristically expresses his disappointment in narcissistic terms: “ ‘I guess I’m the Black Death,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.’ ” Dick has taken pride in his vitality and sexual prowess, but now gradually declines into emotional vacuity, physical deterioration and self-hatred, while Nicole becomes increasingly stronger and self-assured.

Dick and Rosemary’s first attempt to make love is interrupted by the arrival of Abe North, and leads to the climax of Part I, the greatest crisis of the novel. When Rosemary discovers that a Negro has been murdered and dumped in her bedroom, Dick carries the bloody sheets into the room he shares with Nicole, who then breaks down completely. In his
Notebooks
Fitzgerald recorded: “Went into the bathroom and sat on the seat crying because it was more private than anywhere she knew.” In the novel Nicole retreats into a traditionally inviolable sanctuary, cracks up and—like the fool in
King Lear
—screams out the truth in her madness. Realizing that Dick has sacrificed her to save Rosemary from scandal, Nicole exclaims: “I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.”
¹³
Dick’s three desperately rational repetitions of “Control yourself!” reveal at last his true relationship with Nicole: that he is her doctor, she his only patient. His guilty impulse to protect Rosemary has sacrificed Nicole’s sanity.

Dick has forced Nicole to associate what she imagines to be the bedsheets bloodied by Dick’s defloration of Rosemary with the even more horrible bloody sheets she had lain on when seduced by her own father. And, like her father, Dick is more concerned with covering up the problem than acknowledging his guilt. Nicole’s mental breakdown, like the earlier one witnessed by Violet McKisco at the Villa Diana, has been caused by her sexual jealousy of Rosemary. Dick has therefore been fully aware of the consequences of continuing the affair.

Nicole’s third breakdown, in another unbearably intense scene, is again caused by sexual jealousy. The mother of a mental patient writes a wounding letter to Nicole explaining that she has withdrawn her fifteen-year-old daughter from the clinic because Dick has kissed and tried to seduce her. This time Nicole cracks up at a Swiss fair while riding on a ferris wheel—a metaphor for both the up and down phases of her madness and for the Catherine-wheel torture of her existence. As they drive home with their two children on the steep curving road that leads to the clinic, “the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road. . . . She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood. ‘You were scared, weren’t you?’ she accused him. ‘You wanted to live!’ ”

This incident is described from Dick’s point of view, with all the confusion of violence and screams. The steering wheel, which recalls the ferris wheel, becomes the symbol of their marriage as Dick tries to wrest control from Nicole and she—who had once been disfigured by eczema—tries “to tear at Dick’s face.” When Dick recognizes that Nicole truly wanted to kill him at that moment, even if it meant killing herself and her children, he decides to separate from her temporarily.

Leaving Nicole in the care of his partner at the clinic, he goes away to ski for a few days by himself. He tries to think tenderly of Nicole, to love “her best self.” But, attempting to preserve his own sanity, Dick realizes that “he had lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zürichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.” He reflects that “he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.” This passage suggests the almost therapeutic drive in the novel: the search to determine when things had gone wrong, where Fitzgerald had “lost himself” and, most poignantly, how he could continue to see Zelda as the person he had once loved and had wanted to impress with his worldly success.

The drunken brawl with the police in Rome, which takes place at the end of Part II, parallels Nicole’s breakdown at the end of Part I. In the winter of 1924 Fitzgerald had actually been beaten by the police in Rome after he had punched a plainclothes policeman. The brawl in the novel starts when Dick slaps a policeman’s face (which recalls Barban slapping McKisco’s face to provoke the duel) and echoes the sad fate of Abe North, who has been beaten to death in a speakeasy. When Baby Warren rescues Dick from jail, she firmly establishes her moral superiority and uses it to control and to “own” him.

Dick’s infidelity with Rosemary and degradation in Rome persuade Nicole to have a retaliatory affair with the tough and heroic Tommy Barban. Before offering herself to Tommy (who is wearing Dick’s borrowed clothes) Nicole opposes Dick’s will, for the first time, by giving Tommy some rare camphor rub for his sore throat. At this symbolic moment, she transfers her emotions from Dick to Tommy and takes over Dick’s role as physician and dispenser of medicine. When she drives away with Tommy a little later, Nicole echoes the expression of sexual desire that Rosemary had overheard at the beginning of the novel by begging Tommy to stop the car so they can immediately have sex. Though Nicole, on the previous occasion, had to wait several hours to sleep with Dick, she cannot wait a minute longer to sleep with Tommy, when
she
feels sorry for Dick. As he tries to save himself from despair, she finally expresses the crucial truth about their disastrous marriage: “You’re a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”

Tender Is the Night
has a melodramatic plot (a duel, two murders, incest and three mental breakdowns) and an excess of coincidence. Violet McKisco overhears the Divers at the Villa Diana and Rosemary overhears them in a Paris restaurant. Dick accidentally meets Nicole on a Swiss funicular, meets Tommy in Munich, meets Rosemary and then Baby Warren in Rome, and meets Tommy once again at a party on a yacht. Despite its faults in structure and plot, which Fitzgerald later hoped to remedy by changing the original chronology of the novel, it remains a carefully constructed work of art.

Dick’s decline from promising idealist to hopeless failure is precisely calibrated. He begins to drink heavily, kisses his patients, sleeps with Rosemary, is beaten up, betrays his son at Mary North’s house, loses interest in his career, his book and his clinic, breaks with his partner Franz Gregorovius, quarrels with Mary North, fights with his French cook, fails at water sports while trying to impress Rosemary, and adopts an increasingly passive and pathetic role with Franz, Rosemary, Tommy, Nicole and his children.

Fitzgerald used the details of his own life and Zelda’s illness as material for the novel. Nicole’s letters to Dick contain extracts of actual letters Zelda wrote. Many of the bitter conversations in the novel have the ring of real exchanges, and give the book a hard, Wildean brilliance. In Nicole’s dispute with Abe North at the station we hear the wife reproaching the husband for his drinking:

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.”

“My business is to tear them apart.”

“When you get drunk you don’t tear anything apart except yourself.”

Abe’s sardonic epigram: “Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you,” could have been written by Dorothy Parker.

Fitzgerald also peoples his novel with characters drawn from life. It was dedicated to Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were the models for the positive side of Dick and Nicole Diver, before their tragic descent. Gerald’s Irish good looks, jockey cap and ritual of raking the sand, Sara’s skill in cooking and gardening, her habit of sunning her pearls on the beach, were portrayed in the novel along with their daughter Honoria, a partial model (with Scottie) for Topsy, and their luxurious house, the Villa America, which Fitzgerald calls the Villa Diana.

Abe North, the alcoholic composer, was based on Fitzgerald’s drinking companion Ring Lardner, and Tommy Hitchcock inspired the soldier of fortune, Tommy Barban, as he had inspired Tom Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby.
Nicole’s sister Baby Warren—whose callousness, unrequited sexuality and crass materialism provide a powerful contrast to Rosemary’s elegant innocence—was partly based on Zelda’s older sister and Fitzgerald’s bête noire, Rosalind Smith, who (like Baby in the novel) unfairly blamed Fitzgerald for Zelda’s mental breakdown. Rosemary Hoyt was modeled on Lois Moran, whom Fitzgerald had an affair with in 1927. It is significant that in the novel Dick’s affair with Rosemary occurs
before
—and directly provokes—Nicole’s retaliatory adultery with Tommy Barban. Fitzgerald had apparently tried to apportion blame more equally for their unhappy marriage.

Fitzgerald took some revenge, in his minor characters, on people he had known. The pretentious, corrupt and successful writer, Albert McKisco, was partly based on the alternately hard-boiled and sentimental novelist Robert McAlmon. An American expatriate and minor
littérateur
on the fringe of Fitzgerald’s Parisian circle of friends, McAlmon was notorious for his caustic tongue and malicious gossip. He spread the rumor that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.

The satiric caricature of Bijou O’Conor, begun in “The Hotel Child,” took more serious and substantial form in
Tender Is the Night.
In this novel she reappears as the fragile, tubercular, decadent Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, who is doing a dance of death as the Sepoys assault the ruined fort. This phrase, and Lady Capps-Karr’s favorite expression, “After all a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum”—Fitzgerald’s bizarre notion of quintessential upper-class English speech, which Bijou would never have actually said—occur both in “The Hotel Child” and in
Tender Is the Night,
linking Lady Capps-Karr and Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers to their common model, Bijou O’Conor.

Tommy Barban thinks Lady Caroline is the wickedest woman in London and Nicole cattily remarks: “it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms, could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire.”
¹⁴
At the end of the novel Lady Caroline and Mary North dress up as sailors and are arrested—as Dick had been after a drunken brawl in Rome—after picking up two French girls. Though Dick had been insulted by Lady Caroline, he rescues them from an Antibes jail—as Baby Warren had rescued him from a Rome jail. As the French police express their disgust and Dick observes Lady Caroline’s lack of any sense of evil, he bitterly concludes that she represents the “concentrated essence of the anti-social.”

Though
Tender Is the Night
is intensely autobiographical, it also transcends the personal by placing the characters against a detailed contemporary background. The tragic episodes of the novel take place in the context of violent political events, suggested by the allusions to Ulysses Grant, the victorious general in the American Civil War, who “invented mass butchery.” Dick and Abe take Rosemary on a tour of the World War I battlefields, which had left “the dead like a million bloody rugs.” There is an implicit comparison between Dick—who spent most of the war as a medical student in neutral Switzerland and who feels a corresponding guilt for not having risked his life in the war—and Tommy Barban, a volatile mercenary who will fight for any side that pays him. Fitzgerald refers to the Russian Revolution and the fighting between the Communists and Nazis in Munich, to the Spanish-Moroccan war in the Riff near the western edge of Europe and the Greco-Turkish war near the eastern.