Tender is the Night (50 page)

“Have I been nourished?” he asked.

Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it—since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism——”

Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.

Dick felt fine—he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child's, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.

… Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky….

“You once liked me, didn't you?” he asked.

“
Liked
you—I
loved
you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking——”

“There has always been something between you and me.”

She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”

“Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn't keep it up much longer.

“I always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically. “More about me than any one has ever known. Perhaps that's why I was so afraid of you when we didn't get along so well.”

His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together. Then, as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun.

“I must go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more—his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.

“I'm going to him.” Nicole got to her knees.

“No, you're not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly. “Let well enough alone.”

N
ICOLE
kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I'll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not—why should you?”

Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practising general medicine, and later that he
was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.

After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, N.Y., and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, N.Y., which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Tender is the Night
was first published in 1934, by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York and Chatto & Windus in London. In 1951 a revised version was published, edited by Malcolm Cowley from a copy of the novel which Fitzgerald had reorganized and in which he had made corrections. Penguin Books began reprinting this revised version in 1955.

Scholarly opinion, both textual and critical, has come, however, to regard the Cowley version with disfavour. Fitzgerald had clearly not completed his revision project and he may have abandoned it as not worth carrying out. His basic idea was to reconstruct the novel into chronological order, placing the ‘flashback' chapters (
Book II
,
I
to
X
) at the begining of the book. Fitzgerald's workng copy contains a few alterations which he thought required by the ‘new' order and some others, but Cowley made hundreds more (of both kinds), and there is no way in which a reader of the revised version can tell without research whether Fitzgerald actually wrote what he is reading.

This new Penguin Books text returns to the first edition, and is the first UK paperback to be based upon it. Where there seemed any need for change, however small, all Fitzgerald's manuscripts, typescripts and surviving proof-sheets were consulted to determine whether a preferable reading might have been lost in transmission. (In the late stages of composition and proof-reading, Fitzgerald was very hard-pressed for deadlines and his health was poor. His attention to textual accuracy was subordinated to other matters.) The serial publication of the novel in
Scribner's Magazine
has also been consulted, as have almost all subsequent reprints of the novel and the textual work of Matthew J. Bruccoli cited in the List of Variants: each has provided suggestions in particular difficult cases. But every alteration from the first edition (US) has been itemized in the List of Variants, and readers of the Penguin Books text may thus know at a glance whether any change has been made, where
the reading in the text originates, and what the first edition read. It is hoped by this means to present the best modern reprint available.

A
RNOLD
G
OLDMAN

BOOK I

1
…
and Cannes, five miles away
: As the first paragraph indicates, the time scheme of the novel is complex. The time span runs from June 1925 in Book I to summer 1929 in Book III. However, Book II (chs. I–IX) returns to 1917–19. For a detailed outline and commentary, see Parkinson, ch. 3.

2
‘
Antheil's my man
': George Antheil (1900–59). An avant-garde American composer, living in Paris during the early 1920s, who sought to represent contemporary life by producing music ‘like an incredibly beautiful machine'. His
Ballet mécanique
(1926) was scored for anvils, aeroplane propellers, electric bells, motor horns, pieces of tin and steel and sixteen player-pianos.

3
‘
McKisco?
': Nicole is hunting for the brand-name Crisco, which would link the pasticheur McKisco to a butter substitute. See Cummings, p. 261.

4
‘…
since Connie Talmadge was a kid
': Connie Talmadge (1893–1973). A Hollywood comedienne during the 1920s, whose sophisticated comedies were nearly as popular as her sister Norma's dramas. Brady's reference to ‘kid' links Talmadge to the work of D. W. Griffiths (a director Fitzgerald admired and for whom Talmadge performed in
Intolerance
(1916)). Griffiths' pre-war films often involved ‘child-women' as stars (Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Lilian Gish, Mary Pickford). See Prigozy.

5
apostolic gesture
: One of several clerical allusions (see also ‘chasuble' (48), ‘sacred' (53), ‘Vêtements Ecclésiastiques' (103)), culminating in Dick's papal blessing of the beach (337). In his ‘General Plan' for the novel (1932), Fitzgerald spoke of Diver as ‘a natural idealist, a spoiled priest.' Quoted in Bruccoli,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur
, p. 335.

6
Villa Diana
: Diana is the goddess of hunting, patroness of woodlands and chastity. She had an aversion to marriage and obtained from her father (Jupiter) permission to live in perpetual celibacy and to preside over the travails of women. Her destruction of Actaeon (turned to a stag and torn to pieces by her dogs) for penetrating her private groves suggests her resentment of intrusion. The Villa is very much of Nicole's design, and its name alludes richly both to her gardening and to her desires.

7
Mrs. Burnett
: Frances Burnett (1849–1924). Author of romantic stories
and novels, many of them for children, of which the most famous are
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(1886) and
The Secret Garden
(1911). Allusions to writing for children (see also Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne (67), and
Daddy-Long-Legs
and
Molly-Make-Believe
(135)) are part of a more general associative network concerned with the provision of coercive entertainment for children. The ‘tensile strength' of Dick's ‘social' and ‘psychiatric balance' (76) is often ghosted by the language of toy-making (132, 133, 153, 176, 207, 272). Dick's skills as a socialite and psychiatrist are synonymous, depending on a capacity to reconstruct the mental interiors of others in forms that would have been understandable to pedagogues in Victorian nurseries.

8
the Riff
: A traditionally warlike tribe, of Berber extraction, living in the mountains of Northern Morocco. In 1922 they defeated Spanish occupiers to found the Republic of the Riff, but Spanish and French forces subdued the rebellion in 1926.

9
who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?
: echoes Claudius' cry at the close of ‘The Mouse-Trap' (
Hamlet
V. 2); Hamlet's ‘Give me some light' is taken up by All as ‘Lights, lights, lights!' Fitzgerald alludes to
Hamlet
to suggest the enormity of the disruption just witnessed by Mrs McKisco in the Diver bathroom.

10
‘
Plagued by the nightingale
': Doherty argues that the novel deals with characters variously enamoured of romantic allusion and, more particularly, that Nicole functions as a Keatsian nightingale, drawing Dick towards ecstatic union and subsequent oblivion and self-loss. The novel is subtitled ‘A Romance', and takes its title from Keats' ‘Ode to a Nightingale', a poem which Fitzgerald said he could never read without tears. See the epigraph and Doherty.

11
President Tyler
: President John Tyler (1790–1862). Tenth president of the US (1841–5) an aristocratic Virginian Republican, possibly cited by Fitzgerald because he was noted as ‘approachable, courteous' and conciliatory. Such a lineage links Mary North to Dick in the matter of well-mannered Southern patriarchs.

12
‘
I'll be at the hotel at four
': Recalls ‘And if it rains, a closed car at four.' (‘A Game of Chess', T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land
). Fitzgerald admired T. S. Eliot and met him in 1932. He knew
The Waste Land
extremely well. See Vot, p. 271.

13
…
and three yards of new cloth the colour of prawns
: The account of the Parisian shopping spree may well have been suggested by stanzas XIV and XV of Keats' ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil'. See Swann, p. 437.

14
Hermès
: Well-known purveyor of luxury goods to the wealthy. Also the Greek name for Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the patron of travellers and also the god of thieves and pickpockets: an apt presence in a passage
concerned jointly with production as an errand run for the wealthy and with property as theft. Fitzgerald intimates that the errand will culminate in a train wreck, an allusion to the stock market crash of October 1929. In the final chapters Tommy Barban states that his stocks are doing well (295), and the lives of the wealthy on the beach appear untouched by financial crisis – details which indicate that the novel closes in the summer of 1929 and prior to the crash.

15
Beaumont-Hamel … Thiepval … Marne
: Sites significant for the 1916 British offensive against the Germans, known by the troops as the Great Fuck-Up. Paul Fussell describes it as ‘the largest engagement fought since the beginnings of civilization' (p. 12). Abe North challenges Dick's seriousness by pointing out that large-scale modern warfare was invented at Petersburg, an American Civil War siege (1864/5). He adds that Dick's account of the Western front as a ‘love battle' derives from D. H. Lawrence. Fitzgerald read Lawrence's
Fantasia of the Unconscious
around May 1930 with some enthusiasm. On the same subject, Lawrence notes: ‘There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling mess beside the railway-smash of love … But never any more will there be enough love-steam to get the system properly running. It is done.' Quoted in Wexelblatt,
American Literature
, pp. 377–88.

16
Undine
: A fairy romance by Baron de la Motte Fouqué, written in 1811. Undine, a water nymph reared as human, marries a knight but is snatched by her watery kin; she returns to prevent her husband's remarriage with a fatal kiss. Dick will first meet Nicole on ‘a damp April day, with … water inert in the low places' (132). The allusion is not simply to T. S. Eliot's ‘April is the cruellest month' (‘The Burial of the Dead',
The Waste Land
), but is one of a network of references linking sexual love to water and things watery, and so – as with
Undine
– to dissolution and to death. (See, for example, 160 and 171.)

17
‘
The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken
': Echoes the prefiguration of last days in
Ecclesiastes
, xii.6.