Fitxa de Lectura: Tender is the night

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934) Rosemary Hoyt, a beautiful eighteen-year-old movie starlet, on vacation with her mother, arrives at a rather deserted portion of the French Riviera. There, Rosemary meets Dick Diver, a handsome American psychologist in his thirties with whom she instantly falls in love. Dick and his wife, Nicole, are exemplars of grace and sophistication, and move among a social set of similarly extraordinary people.

Rosemary becomes part of this world, and in the gay times that follow, Dick begins to reciprocate Rosemary's feelings for him. Everything goes splendidly until, after an alcoholic friend of the Divers accidentally kills a man, Rosemary discovers Dick comforting Nicole, who has had a mental breakdown.

The story shifts back in time to relate the events that led up to the marriage of Dick and Nicole. Dick attended Yale, was a Rhodes scholar, and then moved to Vienna to study clinical psychology. Once, as Dick was leaving a clinic on the Zurichsee, he met the sixteen-year-old Nicole Warren, who was being checked in. The Chicago heiress had been sexually abused by her father and, as a result, had developed an acute fear of men. The two fall in love, and Dick becomes both her doctor and her husband.

They travel extensively, are happy, and have two children together.

Partially on account of Nicole's relapse, the Divers decide to invest in a clinic in Switzerland. Things begin to unravel. Dick is accused of infidelity by a former patient, and Nicole, in anger, runs their car off the road. Dick learns his father has passed away and heads to America for the funeral. Upon his return, Dick meets Rosemary in a hotel, and the two consummate the aborted romance they had begun several years earlier. In the aftermath, Dick realizes his world is falling apart. He goes out carousing, gets beat up and imprisoned, and must be rescued by Nicole's sister, Baby Warren. As Dick continues to drink, he jeopardizes his position at the clinic and is asked to leave.

The Divers return to the Riviera, and Dick continues to drink and unravel, insulting old friends. Nicole has an affair with Tommy Barban and asks Dick for a divorce in order to marry Tommy. Dick readily agrees, realizing that Nicole's finally overcome her psychological condition. Dick then disappears to America, never settling down. The book ends, suggesting that he is still there.

About the author F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel,This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim.

That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labelled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen-writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night.

He died there of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44.

The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one". Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with: His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland.

Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more.

Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly.

Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on

December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died. He was 44.

Download a copy here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301261h.html Other interesting information: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/18/classics.fscottfitzgerald http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/07/28/living-well-is-the-best-revenge Topics for Discussion 1. How would you describe the characters of Dick and Nicole Driver? What is the nature of their marriage? Do they love one another? Talk about how and why their marriage changes during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about Nicole's psychological state? Why did Dick marry her? As his patient, their relationship most likely would be viewed today as a violation of the code of ethics. How does Nicole's mental illness affect their marriage?

3. What do you make of Rosemary Hoyt? Is she a "provocateur" with regards to the Drivers' marriage? Would you describe her as innocent, aggressive, duplicitous...or as a young, naive American out of her depth? Why is Dick Driver attracted to her? What, if anything, does she offer him? What does it say about Rosemary that she is also attracted to Brady right after professing her love for Dick?

4. Rosemary encounters two parties on the beach at the beginning of the book. What is the distinction she makes between the two—and what do the two circles represent? What is your opinion of the two groups?

5. The book's narrator identifies with Rosemary in the first part of the novel. Thus we see the characters through her perspective. Starting in Book 2, however, the narrator is allied with Dick Driver...as we follow him into his decline. Why would Fitzgerald have used two perspectives?

6. Hollywood is, of course, the capital of acting. How does "acting" become a theme throughout the novel? Who besides Rosemary acts? What does Hollywood as "the city of thin partitions" mean? How might that descriptive phrase apply to the main characters?

7. Does Nicole ruin Dick's potential to become a great psychiatrist? In other words, did she ruin his career...or is he the cause of his own downfall?

8. By the end of the novel, Nicole seems to have achieved a healthy mental state. Is Dick responsible for her cure?

9. Critics and scholars see Tender Is the Night as partially autobiographical, tracing F. Scott's and Zelda's marriage. Discuss how the book parallels the Fitzgeralds' own lives.