$Unique_ID{bob01251} $Pretitle{} $Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald Critical Comment, Tender Is The Night} $Subtitle{} $Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott} $Affiliation{Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University} $Subject{dick own diver nicole rather himself tommy ideal indeed moral see pictures see figures } $Date{} $Log{See Discarded*0125101.scf See Tender is the Night*0125102.scf } Title: Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald Book: Tender is the Night Author: Fitzgerald, F. Scott Critic: Cooperman, Stanley Affiliation: Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University Critical Comment, Tender Is The Night D. W. Harding, in his perceptive essay on Tender is the Night, remarks that Fitzgerald's protagonist in his last completed novel is a "tragic child-hero whom no one is great enough to help." For Dick Diver, brilliant psychiatrist and physician, brilliant husband (or rather, guardian) of a brilliantly wealthy and beautiful neurotic, is indeed a perpetual resource for those about him. So completely is he available to be used by others, that he is ultimately quite used up, consumed by an essentially parasitic world whose moral weakness feeds upon moral strength, until the strength itself is broken. And when this happens, when the "goodness" of Dick Diver is no longer needed (and when his own control and power have been sufficiently drained), there can be no question of returning the favor: Dick Diver exists to help rather than to be helped, to be used rather than use. And so he is, ultimately, discarded like an empty medicine bottle. [See Discarded: Is left like an empty medicine bottle. He helps others and than he is discarded.] [See Tender is the Night: Tender is the night.] The 'Ideal' Of Service. Certainly Dick Diver's role as "physician" is essential to the novel. He exists, as Nicole Diver's wealthy sister points out, to serve a function: that, indeed, is what he has been "paid" for. It is Nicole's wealth, after all, that to a great extent has made possible Dick's grace, his manners, his mastery of the entire "carnival by the sea" atmosphere which he enjoys, and which he is entitled to enjoy as a condition of his service. Once this service no longer "pays off" - when the "cure" is completed and when Dick has given all he has to give - the "contract" is cancelled and the physician-husband is simply discharged with gratitude, with some regret, and with considerable embarrassment when the physician himself demonstrates the poor taste of developing weaknesses of his own. In a sick room, after all, the function of the patient is not to take the pulse of the serviceable specialist he has hired. In the moral sick room of the postwar world, Dick Diver finds himself surrounded by "love" which is indeed the product of disease rather than health, and as he proceeds with his various "cures" - as he expends the moral and personal energy at his disposal-his own deterioration becomes inevitable. For Dick Diver, who agreed to make one of his patients his wife (and so contract for exclusive services), forgets that his wife is, primarily, his patient. He makes the fatal error in any such relationship: that is, he fails to remain objective enough, and confuses functional with emotional commitment. Having contracted to cure Nicole, he offers her whatever is necessary to achieve the cure itself, including - and in this lies his fatal weakness - his love. Having offered his love, moreover, he expects her loyalty in return, but fails to remember that whatever loyalty she is able to give, is itself the product of the condition he has been attempting to cure. When the patient is well, there simply is no reason for loyalty at all, and any insistence upon it is rather embarrassing. Morality As Weakness. In the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is repeated insistence that-given the nature of the moral wasteland-love itself must be a source of weakness rather than strength. Lovers, indeed, can only survive when they understand that love is primarily a matter of exchange - an exchange of one sort of currency or another, a contract which depends upon the fulfillment of particular conditions. When the conditions (or one of the lovers) change, the contract is, in a sense, cancelled: emotional commitment itself becomes an irrelevancy. It is this realization which Fitzgerald's protagonists, inevitably romantic Idealists in a world in which "romance" itself represents the very antithesis of Idealism, fail to understand completely, and so create their own destruction. Amory Blaine, for example, in This Side of Paradise, fails to understand that the very basis of his love with Rosalind, his Fairy Princess, must be an "enchanted" love or it is nothing; "enchantment" is the very basis of its existence, and to ask of a Fairy Princess that she become a struggling housewife must be a contradiction in terms, a violation of the original contract. Given the moral wasteland, and the exploitation which lies at the very center of all "romance" in the Wasteland, it is Amory rather than Rosalind who becomes absurd as he insists upon commitments which had never really been included in the original "contract" at all. So too a protagonist like Jay Gatsby forgets that his very role as a lover is defined by the lack of substance of the role itself; for Daisy Buchanan he represents the possibility of a particular kind of romantic "glow" which must be darkened and finally dissipated at the first puff of reality. It is, indeed, Jay Gatsby's "function" to keep such reality away from Daisy, and when, for any reason, he is not able to do so, the conditions of the contract change, the "bargain" is no longer in effect, "all bets is off" and Daisy returns to her husband-whose direct and brutal management of reality represents another kind of "bargain" altogether, but one which he is quite capable of keeping. Nicole As Exploiter. So too, in Tender is the Night, Dick Diver is not so much deserted by Nicole, as eliminated by her when the original conditions of their relationship no longer apply; one might say, indeed, that he is cancelled along with their "contract." For having recovered her strength and health, a kind of hardness of Will defined by Dick himself at the end of the book when he observes that she has become good "Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vitae from New Zealand," Nicole is free to choose, or rather be chosen, by a man who in his own right represents (just as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby represents) an exploiter rather than a creator of "love." Nicole, indeed, no longer wishes or has need of a man who is "always right" in his relations with her or in his facade of mannered perfection which he holds before the world. Given the fact that she has recovered her own Self, so perfect a diagnostician is simply no longer necessary, and so she takes a man who uses what Dick Diver first creates and then (unfortunately) actually loves. The Users And The Used. Dick Diver, of course, is, by the end of the book, no longer "always right" at all, and this in itself would be grounds for the "cancellation of contract" between them. Having taken all through their relationship, Nicole suddenly finds herself in the position of having to give emotional support, or first aid, to her own physician; this is manifestly unfair and unprofitable, and-hard as "Georgia pine" once again, she turns to Tommy Barban, the "realist" of sound calculations and direct appetites. With Tommy, there need be no question of Ideal aside from act, and no question of Loyalty aside from function. With some sentimental regret, and with some pity as well, Nicole turns from the depleted resources of Dick to the sleek, powerful, efficient, pragmatic "hardness" of a man who is indeed morally Dick's inferior, and so-in all other terms-necessarily more functional and less "risky." And for Nicole, like most of Fitzgerald's female protagonists, risk is the ultimate sin, and a kind of functional pragmatism or freedom of impulse the ultimate virtue; with Dick Diver there would be too much of the one, and not enough of the other. Tommy, indeed, even in his "admiration" for Dick at the beginning of the novel, is admiring not the man, but the physician; his indignant "protection" against any sort of interference with the Dick-Nicole relationship is the perception of weakness rather than the acknowledgement of strength. Tommy insists that no distracting sordidness must be allowed to interfere with this "ideal marriage" because he understands clearly that the process of the marriage itself is one of exploitation rather than love; when Nicole is "ready" for him (that is, when she is "cured" and has no further need for the medication provided by Dick, medication which-on his part-so foolishly, almost childishly, turns into love), Tommy will reappear and take what never really belonged to Dick Diver at all. An Ambiguous Marriage. Ironically, Tommy's estimate of the Divers' marriage is in many ways more firmly based upon reality than is the weight of emotional commitment which Dick attempts to place upon it. For one thing, the central trauma of Nicole's life-the incestuous relationship with her own father-resulted in a fixation dramatized as well as ultimately cured by her relationship with Dick. What she "sees" in Dick, in other words, or rather what she requires from him, is at once more ambiguous and less definable than any simple process of emotional "cure." There is, in short, a certain element of transference in Nicole's attitude toward her husband, who, in his role of husband no less than in his function as psychiatrist, "takes up the burden" of Nicole's father in more ways than one. Nicole's father, of course, like Tommy, is one of the users of the world; having created a particular crisis, he simply uses the particular skill and moral strength of Dick to solve the problems involved. When Dick marries his problem as well as treats it, he-in a very basic sense-compounds the condition he set out to cure. As a psychiatrist, of course, Dick knows this and is warned quite clearly and quite forcefully that his marriage to Nicole is (from a professional standpoint) a violation of all those carefully structured values to which, as a physician, he himself had been committed. From a personal standpoint, his marriage to Nicole is even more dangerous; becoming something of a "father-figure" to a woman whose relations with her father had been so shattering, Dick embarks upon a "love" in which emotions are very murky indeed-emotions, furthermore, which depend for their support upon a framework of perfection and strengths normally attributed to a parent rather than a husband. A Waste Of Virtue. In a sense, then, Dick creates for himself a situation in which his own "infallibility," his own "goodness" and "perfection," serves as a framework, or bulwark, for emotional and moral unhealth, and once again, as in so much of Fitzgerald's work, we have a protagonist whose very virtues are directed (or are used) for the perpetuation of everything to which they are ostensibly opposed. One might almost say that Dick dooms himself to play the "father-figure" in two directions: one, the result of psychic trauma (Nicole's incestuous relationship with her father), can be "cured" only at the cost of possible destruction of the physical basis of his marriage; the other-his role as Perfect Parent-must be destroyed when he demonstrates his own weakness or lack of perfection. Either way, Dick Diver, in so many ways the "Fitzgerald Hero" despite his moral superiority to those about him, has built his own Enchanted Palace on a swamp. Dick's virtues, furthermore, are diluted by a fatal lack of that "toughness" or dedication to one's own code which alone can help a man shape his life according to his own convictions. Faced with any sort of need, or pressured by any sort of personal appeal, Dick uses his very Idealism not as a means to shape reality, but rather as a reason for avoiding it. The fact that Rosemary "loves" him, or rather, requires him to serve as her selfless and gentle tutor in the process of her own development, makes Dick's involvement with her all but inevitable; unable to say "no" to the Ideal Purity of his own selflessness, perpetually sacrificing his own standards for noble and ideal reasons, Dick is, finally, indeed "too good to be true." The 'Tragic Child.' In this sense, Dick Diver is a child rather than a man, and it is this quality of childishness which makes Dick's "tragedy" a matter of pathos rather than power. Like Jay Gatsby, who attempts to "fulfill his Platonic conception of himself" by surbordinating all means to some vaguely perceived Ideal of Beauty, Dick attempts to fulfill an equally "Platonic" conception: the Ideal of Pure Goodness. And also like Gatsby, who must be destroyed by his own purity (since the Ideal, by definition, cannot be both owned and worshipped), Dick destroys for himself the possibility of any real relationship, or love, precisely because Pure Goodness makes any such "reward" unthinkable. Devoted to the Ideal of Service, Dick responds only to those situations in which he can achieve the moral superiority of serving - those situations in which he himself is "loved" only as long as he serves. At the same time, however, he becomes exhausted enough to demand that he be loved "for himself along" - quite apart from any service he is able to render. The result, obviously, is a kind of self-created contradiction or impossibility. Like Amory Blaine, who first creates the Ideal and then despises the reality of emotional consummation, Dick Diver creates precisely those situations which virtually guarantee his own "disillusion." "His position at the end," says D. W. Harding of Dick, "is the apotheosis of the hurt child saying 'nobody loves me,' but the child's self-pity and reproaches against the grown ups have been largely rooted out and in their place is a fluctuation between self-disgust and a conviction that this can happen to the nicest children." Even more pathetic than this "self-disgust," however, is the fact that "nobody loves" Dick Diver for very good reason: he has so arranged matters that he is indeed "loved" for his services rather than himself. And his "bitterness" as a result of this discovery hardly earns much sympathy. When Dick, for example, understands that he can have Mary North by "helping" her (as he had "helped" Nicole, and Rosemary, and anyone else who had ever used him), the result is only a "bitter" laughter after which he makes the gesture of self-imposed exile. But certainly the reader may well ask of Dick Diver (as of Amory Blaine): how could he have expected anything else? For Dick, repeating the inevitable fear-of-consummation so notable throughout Fitzgerald's work, surrounds himself with his Ideal of Service just as Amory Blaine surrounds himself with an Ideal of Romance, and Jay Gatsby surrounds himself with an Ideal of Beauty. Ultimately these various Ideals are themselves methods of insulation rather than commitment, methods of avoiding real love rather than achieving it. It is Tommy Barban, the man who makes no pretence of "earning love" through any Idealism, who takes love as it is and offers himself as he is, who ultimately does succeed in "getting the girl." If Tommy (like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby), lacks the idealist dimension of Fitzgerald's "finer" heroes-heroes who are also losers-perhaps we can say that his heroes lack the strength, the will, and the knowledge of reality which enable such people as Tommy to "win out." Objective Narrative. Most of the first section of Tender is the Night (that is, most of Book I) is narrated through the point of view of Rosemary Hoyt, a young, "dewy and still virginal movie actress possessed of a certain strength of will and personal soundness under a veneer of undefined romanticism." Rosemary, of course, provides the kind of objective "observer" which Fitzgerald needs if he is to render the peculiar kind of Idealism which at once serves to ennoble and destroy Dick Diver, and the very "special" world that Dick and Nicole have created. Rosemary, indeed, serves as a means for setting up the surface of the "perfect" world of the Divers, before events force the surface itself to collapse. As she becomes "initiated" into the realities of Dick, Nicole, Tommy Barban, Abe North, and the others who make up the "circle" whom she first meets at the French Riviera ("the carnival by the Sea," as Fitzgerald was later to remark of his own experience with Zelda), and as she "loves" Dick Diver himself, there is a sense of some kind of emotional or moral disease beneath the enchantment, and the cleverness, and all the loveliness and charm of the Dick Diver world that deepens and intensifies. But even before we know precisely what this unhealth or illusion actually might be, there is strong emphasis on precisely those qualities which foreshadow events to come. Part of this emphasis is achieved by the terms in which the characters are described either through Rosemary's point of view, the objective commentary of Fitzgerald as author, or "symbolic action" in which apparently insignificant details refer to definitive qualities or roles. An example of the latter method is the scene in which Nicole Diver, having arranged to meet Dick for a love-assignation, goes "shopping" with Rosemary, who is herself in love with the "perfect" young psychiatrist. As Nicole "buys things" with complete carelessness and a kind of wild "acquisitive impulse," what emerges is the portrait of a woman whose personal identity is defined primarily by her role as consumer, and this is indeed not only a basic role for Nicole Diver, but for the "Fitzgerald Woman" as a type. The 'Realist.' Just as Nicole's role as consumer, as user, is foreshadowed by the early scenes of the book, so too Tommy Barban's direct and ruthless drive to power is defined both through Rosemary's point of view, and dramatic referral, in which comments made in one context actually define an important quality set up in another. For Tommy, as we first meet him (through Rosemary's impressions), is "unmistakably Latin," is lean, hard, practical, self-contained in his own appetites and own desires. There is little of the glow of Idealism that surrounds Dick Diver (as it does with the Fitzgerald Hero in general); he gives the impression of "bunched force," a kind of ferocity and will, and is somehow "less civilized" than the others. Tommy, indeed, "likes" the Divers, "especially her" - and yet after being with Nicole and Dick, some inner pressure within himself forces him to "go to war." Certainly there is violence here (violence and Will define Tommy as the Ideal of Service defines Dick); and even more than violence, an impatience with any moral or intellectual idealism whatsoever. He is a mercenary soldier, and-as he explains to the hapless Albert McKisco, a rather ineffectual American "intellectual" with whom he later fights a "duel" to protect the Divers from scandal - "my business is to kill people." There is a simplicity, and force, and stubborn stupidity about Tommy which indeed make up an impressive whole, for these qualities are themselves subordinated to the assertion of Will and appetite. And as he "protects" the Divers, as he serves as their "watch-dog," one feels that he is serving not them, but himself. Such is, of course, the case, for it is Tommy Barban who "takes" Nicole after she has consumed her husband and returned to "health"; it is Tommy who finally breaks the marriage he so forcefully "protects" early in the book. And in this connection, the remark of Dick Diver in quite another context, serves not only to define Tommy's role, but the nature of his own marriage as well. Refusing a screen test that Rosemary had arranged in a burst of adolescent enthusiasm, Dick remarks: "The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged." A Spiritual Vacuum. By the end of Book I, at any rate, Rosemary - and the reader - has indeed been initiated into the moral and spiritual vacuum which exists beneath the surface of the "enchanted" Dick Diver world. Abe North, for example, the composer who after a period of creative genius has degenerated into an alcoholic failure, serves as counterpoint to Dick himself; both men are sensitive, noble, "fine," and flawed by a fatal weakness or inability to focus their virtues. Like Abe North, Dick Diver has exhausted his own talents on trivialities, has wasted his own disciplined will and education so that the result is not "work," but rather self-indulgence to an Ideal which is itself a triviality. It is significant that "Abe's "musical score" and Dick's "scientific book" are placed in the same category: they are both real labors that have been dissipated and finally destroyed by devotion to the same sort of "meretricious beauty" that turned the virtues of Jay Gatsby into a pathetic dream, and the intellectual and imaginative richness of Amory Blaine into a St. Vitus dance of perpetual adolescence. Rosemary Hoyt, of course, later in the book "grows out" of her love for Dick; possessed of a firm, disciplined, and unwavering Will-to-reality, she develops into a woman, and for this reason can offer nothing to Dick Diver, who persists in replacing his own manhood with a role of his own creation-a role in which "perfection" and "youthfulness" and the Ideal of service actually serve as a kind of "enchanted circle" in which Dick attempts to avoid the challenge of reality. A Retreat From Reality. So too does Nicole "outgrow" her husband; still requiring direction and will in her man, she finds that Dick is, after all, so fully devoted to his own nobility as a physician-father that he can be nothing else. And so Dick Diver sinks further and further into a morass of desperation and "demoralized" nobility; because he refuses to face the facts of his own decay, there is total failure of that Idealism which he had erected as a bulwark against futility. And in this connection, one might note that Dick's comments on World War I as the destruction of an entire value-structure, has much to do with his own "retreat" from reality itself. Dick's "Idealism," at any rate, finally sinks from the weight of its own impossibilities, and the final result represents something more than the decay of a single individual or the break up of a single marriage. For in the story of Dick Diver we have still another dramatization of a system in which men become incapable of growing past an Ideal which is itself based upon a waste of original power, or rather the distortion of such power through a kind of perpetual adolescence. And this, of course, is the "story" which F. Scott Fitzgerald dramatized in his novels - and in so much of his own life. Essay Questions And Answers, Tender Is The Night 1. Dick Diver has been called a "tragic child." Discuss the meaning of this phrase, and its application to Tender is the Night. Answer: The very phrase "tragic child" is, in a basic sense, a contradiction in terms, and this to no small extent points up a paradox in the role of Dick Diver himself. For the Tragic Hero is by general definition a man great enough, and possessed of courage enough, to confront the necessary consequences of his own actions, and the reality upon which these actions are based. For Dick Diver, however, neither consequences nor reality are confronted at all; Dick, indeed, uses his very virtues and talents not to shape the real world, but rather to avoid it-to build an Ideal which itself serves as a kind of moral and emotional wish-fulfillment. The fact that Dick is motivated by wish-fulfillment rather than choice of action is something more than a "Tragic Flaw"; it is a measure of his incapacity to reach any tragic dimension whatsoever. His vision of reality, in short, is less "flawed" by error, than it is filtered through - and distorted by - a refusal to commit himself to any relationship not based upon the Role which he has created for himself. In this sense he is indeed a "child," or at least a perpetual adolescent, and the lack of manliness and substance so basic to Dick as a protagonist is at best part of a larger "tragedy": the tragedy of an entire culture devoted to the substitution of Romance for reality, and of wish-fulfillment or impulse for choice. 2. How does Tender is the Night represent an advance in narrative structure when compared to a novel like This Side of Paradise? Answer: This Side of Paradise, the first of Fitzgerald's novels, is a brilliant but episodic work by a very young writer who too often sacrifices unity of effect and structure for a kind of aesthetic self-indulgence: that is, a kind of "storytelling" in which the author too often merely demonstrates his own cleverness with "smart" but irrelevant asides, observations, and episodes. In his first novel, moreover, Fitzgerald himself seems too "close" to his material; he both mocks and rhapsodizes over his own characters, and the result is a confused judgment - and a confused reaction on the part of the reader. With Tender is the Night, however, Fitzgerald subordinates episode to total drama, and succeeds-as in The Great Gatsby-in making the drama itself a symbol of wider moral and social meaning. There is far less random "cleverness" than in This Side of Paradise; the cleverness itself, in other words, is subordinated to the purpose and meaning of the drama. By maintaining a certain objectivity, moreover, Fitzgerald avoids intruding into his own narrative. His use of Rosemary Hoyt's point of view, for example, serves at once to introduce the characters, to define Rosemary herself, and to provide a dimension of irony to the subsequent dramatic development. 3. Discuss Tommy Barban as a "Hero of the Moral Wasteland." Answer: Like Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, Tommy Barban is a man completely without Ideals; his only moral "code," indeed, is one of calculated self-interest, and the imposition of his own will in order to achieve the object of his own desires or appetites. A mercenary soldier whose "business is to kill," Tommy is a creature of violence-without-meaning; even his political "ideology" (if such a word can be applied to Tommy at all) is simply a matter of self-interest. So too Tommy's "protection" of Dick Diver and Nicole is a matter of calculation; understanding that Nicole "needs" Dick so long as she is ill, he also understands that Nicole will be ripe for the taking when Dick's "services" are no longer required. 4. What Is Dick Diver's "Great betrayal"? Answer: The great betrayal made by Dick Diver-the fatal action (or avoidance of action) which in a sense creates his own destruction-is the fact that he violates the commitments and ethics of real work for the sake of a false or romanticised "Ideal" of self-sacrifice. Like Jay Gatsby, who subordinates all ethics in pursuit of his Golden Girl, or like Amory Blaine (in This Side of Paradise) who subordinates consummation to adolescent romance, Dick Diver subordinates his own identity as a physician and a worker to a kind of "charm" and "service" which is at once false and self-perpetuating. Scorning real work and real life as somehow too "small" for his own dreams, Dick ultimately fails as a physician and as a person-despite the fact that he is, in all respects, a "purer" individual than are the masters and manipulators of the moral wasteland-people like Tommy Barban, "Baby" Warren, or Nicole herself.