Tender Is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  She guessed that something was developing behind the silence, behind the hard, blue eyes, the almost unnatural interest in the children. Uncharacteristic bursts of temper surprised her ... It was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface (288).

  V

  I have tried to 'calculate' the hidden narrative shaping Dick's desire for Daddys' girls. Fitzgerald provides two - Nicole and Rosemary - each of whom may be read as embodying a tendency within the history of capital. As Dick shifts his romantic allegiance from wife to mistress, so, in my markedly parabolic terms, he achieves emission, loses hardness and comes apart in the very flows that he has always contained. Two events are symptomatic of what is generally read as Dick Diver's decline, the death of the Reverend Diver and the beating in Rome. His father's death discontinues Dick's ties with the 'sureties' of the nineteenth century; more importantly, the funeral allows him to recognize that severance: 'Good-by, my father--good-by, all my fathers' (224). The reader may find in the ensuing return to Europe several clues to fallen paternity. McKisco shares Dick's passage: Fitzgerald notes that he has made a literary name from pastiche, and adds, tellingly, the 'feat ... [is] not to be disparaged' (225). Misrepresentation of an original authority can, it seems, be the basis for 'new self-respect'. On the train to Rome, Dick discovers 'a miserable family of two girls and their mother' at a loss for a father; Dick immediately stands in - his 'pleasure' at enabling them 'to regain their proper egotism' is brief and based, he now knows, on 'plot' and 'illusion' (226). The 'ego', as underwritten by the father, suffers further damage as Dick books into the Hotel Quirinal in Rome and consummates his affair with Rosemary (only to feel like the Black Death (239)). Quirinus is a god of war identified with the deified Romulus. Fitzgerald's taste in Hotels is less than casual: Dick beds the daughter of the new economic fathers in a room dedicated to a founding classical paternity. As if sacrilege against one deity were not enough, Dick finds the city of papal fathers 'dirty', liable to 'Victorian dust' (241) and to the 'sweat of exhausted cultures' (244), a setting well suited to disaffiliation and to the guilty self-dismemberment which succeeds it. The imbroglio with the taxi drivers results directly from Dick's disappointment at failing to contact a girl in a night club:

  She was a young English girl, with blonde hair and a healthy, pretty English face and she smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it ... 'She looks like somebody in the movies,' he said. (242-3)

  The pick-up - a commercial extension of Rosemary - is not picked up (though, predictably, there is an 'unpleasant' 'Bahama Negro' at the edge of the scene (242)). Dick punishes himself for his desire by provoking a fight: 'He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel' (246). Dick asks for it, as though to prove to himself the evacuation of his own 'integrity'. In the shadow play of allegory he has cast down multiple fathers and has responded to the delights of the sphere of reproduction; he can, therefore, no longer experience selfhood as an entity. In court he has no option other than to insist that he raped the five-year-old girl. By straining to bury the 'bad' father and to resurrect the 'good' so that Nicole may be made 'whole' again, Dick's entire professional and domestic life up to this seemingly ludicrous protestation may have served only to repeat the 'bad' father's crime. Hasn't Rome, and Dick's commitment to a Daddy's girl whose very existence is wealth's new experiment with untraced channels of expenditure, proved that at one level he raped Nicole? My question is at once gnomic and dogmatic.

  To clarify: read retrospectively, incest embodies accumulation; read as a projection having a different economic emphasis, Warren's act and Dick's complicity become expressions of accumulation's new problematic - the problematic of self-transgression - whereby energy (in this case sexual) needs to try untried combinations and to multiply selves as a multiplication of markets. Having acknowledged incest, Dick can only come apart multitudinously. The logic of reproduction has it that self-destruction, or rather a systematic revision of selfhood, is integral to the continuity of capital. The bourgeoisie of this phase are ever their own best barbarians; only by putting themselves to the sword, in the form of the advertising-copywriter's pen, can they ensure class longevity. Breakage becomes a structural principle of the bourgeoisie during the twenties and therefore informs the latent plots and available personalities of that class.

  The affair with Rosemary intensifies Dick's dawning sense of his own theatricality. In Rome he assures her 'gently' that his own social gifts are a 'trick' (236); earlier on the Riviera, he made a similar declaration to her mother, but then cheered himself up with the phrase 'a trick of the heart' (181). The integrative capacity of that iconic organ will not, however, withstand his later, careful distinction between manner and morale. Discussing his own transformation, he tells Rosemary at their final meeting, 'The change came a long way back--but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks' (307). His moral would seem to be: where manners are experienced as mannerisms, 'whole soul[s]' can no longer crystallize from their systematic application.

  The degree of Dick's self-knowledge belies the critical consensus which deprives him of an active place in his own fall. The very vocabulary of decline charges an external force with responsibility: critics generally name alcohol, money or authorial autobiography as the prime suspects. However, Dick's knowledge of his own position within a sexual and economic trauma makes the term 'failure' a critical whitewash. Dick neither declines nor falls - he jumps or, more specifically, takes a dive. His repeated failure to raise a man on his shoulders while riding an aquaplane can be taken as an expression of middle-aged vanity or as the nostalgia of a dissolute athlete; however, such readings ignore the pervasive vocabulary of theatre running through the incident. Arguably, Dick's manner of parting company with the Baby Gar is the last act in his release from and of Nicole. Immediately after the event, on the beach with Rosemary and Nicole, Dick discusses acting in what is effectively a gloss on his own recent performance. He promotes a style of 'burlesque' arising from the actor's compulsive need to retain audience attention, arguing that, since the audience can 'do the "responding" for themselves', the duty of the performer is to 'do something unexpected': 'If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them--if they think she's soft she goes hard. You go all out of character--you understand?' (309-10; italics in source). Dick outlines his own method on the board. He too went 'all out of character'. Where the audience thinks him adroit (hard), he is inept (soft). Where the audience hopes for direction, he mismanages. A performance of decline is undertaken at some distance from the facts of decline - almost in the style of one of Brecht's Chinese actors:

  The performer portrays incidents of utmost passion, but without his delivery becoming heated. At those points where the character portrayed is deeply excited the performer takes a lock of hair between his lips and chews it. But this is like a ritual, there is nothing eruptive about it. It is quite clearly somebody else's repetition of the incident: a representation. (Brecht, 'Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting' 93)

  Dick's 'alienation effect' entails the representation of dissolution so that Nicole may be released to the new forms of money. Earlier, and with intimations of another dive, it had involved a tacit mutual suicide from the deck of Golding's yacht:

  his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.

  'You ruined me, did you?' he inquired blandly. 'Then we're both ruined. So----'

  Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him--again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation--all right, then----

  --But now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighin
g: 'Tch! tch!' (294)

  Dick 'portrays' the suicide pact, delivering this trope from the genre of romance with the detachment of a chess player, and terminating his exposition on two brief expulsions of breath, which caption both the scene and Nicole's absorption in it as childish nonsense. Barban approaches and Dick demonstrates the appropriateness of Nicole's new partner with the pointed question, 'Are you rich, Tommy?' (295).

  To return, briefly, to Dick's beach workshop on theatre technique - although addressing Rosemary, he simultaneously talks to Nicole:

  let's suppose that somebody told you, 'Your lover is dead.' In life you'd probably go to pieces. But on the stage you're trying to entertain--the audience can do the responding for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience's attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. (309)

  Given that everyone involved has been party to the murder of Peterson, Dick's example is calculated. In effect, Nicole is told that her lover is dead, and that in order to retain her class position (perceived as a relationship with a mass audience) she must avoid response and pursue gesture. Significantly, Dick casts himself as the 'murdered Chinese': his choice of figure is complex, perhaps involving an ironic reflection on his status as disposable servant; it also makes cryptic allusion to his own ethnically stained emissions, while, for Rosemary, hinting that what went on in Parisian and Roman hotel rooms was little more than the hiring and firing of a foreign body. These layers remain peripheral to the main direction of his lesson which, as the culmination of his language of fabrication, reflects his conviction that the social arena has become a stage where audience demand is paramount. In such circumstances, 'charm' and 'grace' give way to mere lying, as the mass market requires of its market leaders only that they surprise and so, through provision of the 'new', continue to lead. Nicole obeys instructions: she turns directly to Barban and to brand name, going 'all out of character' in order to retain the characteristics of a changing class. She leaves the beach feeling 'new and happy' (310), and 'knowing vaguely that Dick had planned for her to have [her freedom]' (311), she writes a letter propositioning her next husband.

  Book III charts Dick's sustained performance of decline, during which he declares himself no longer effective; no longer a centre, an author or indeed a responsible agent of action. All is lethargy, parody and scorn: witness the sustained metaphors of vampirism, Dick's bouts of interior laughter (337) and his final act - 'with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace' (337). Dick abdicates comprehensively from what he has made, from his familial and professional tasks and, more disturbingly, from what he has been made - a 'whole-souled' (67), integral being.

  Nor can he be put together again. Poised above contrary movements within the capital which provides his foundation, he quits the sites which his adoptive class prefers. In no particular order, and virtually all at once, he deserts the psychiatric armchair, the surrogate drawing-rooms, the phallus and even (projecting) the sound-stage. Dick's dive is complete and outdistances the critics. Perhaps 'the old interior laughter' prompted the selection of an aquaplane from which to parody his surname. To push the pun (maybe no further than Fitzgerald intended) Dick does not resurface: without fixed abode or declared destination, his movements after his return to America are quite literally mapped by Nicole, but they are not understood. Symptomatically, he rejects her offer of money and no longer 'ask[s] for the children to be sent' (338), capital and the family being two of the mediations through which he made himself what he was and has chosen no longer to be.

  The problem remains: if Dick decides to quit, and money, alcohol, general dissolution or Fitzgerald's autobiography cannot in any emphatic sense be 'blamed', why does he quit? At no point in the novel is his decision directly addressed, an omission that should not produce charges of slack construction or inadequate characterization. The question raises the broader issue of Fitzgerald's narrative technique. Cause passes from persons into objects viewed as metaphors or, more properly, as plot miniatures and encapsulated narratives. Fitzgerald's nine-year struggle with the construction of Tender is the Night reflects his fear that story no longer issues from voice, even as action no longer resides in he who acts. Commodity, perceived as having a particular history, becomes the new narrative centre. Things, and characters as their carriers, determine action. Such a view is focused by Marx in his definition of the commodity form: 'It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things' (Marx 165). 'Things' grow positively hydra-headed as they register a marked shift in the system of production and so in relations between men.

  Tender is the Night establishes that a beach umbrella casts the 'shadow of the fantastic phallus', (Deleuze and Guattari 97), which as it falls assumes the restless forms of changing accumulation and modified manners. The umbrella is typical of the Divers' belongings in that it comes to mean through various human processes. If the meaning of an object is not an idea but a petrifaction of action, things are always and necessarily human: it follows that action may recognize itself in those objects of which it is a part. I have been reading Fitzgerald's perceptual habits through Sartre's practico inert; further quotation may help: 'The idea of a thing is in the thing, that is to say, it is the thing itself revealing its reality through the practice which constitutes it, and through the instruments and institutions which define it' (Sartre 50). The practico inert is a large constituent of our subjectivity, since it makes up what surrounds us ad nauseam, in whose worked matter we learn, almost without learning, how to work. Things so defined operate as a strict but scarcely felt necessity at the heart of human relations: 'Materialized practices, poured into the exteriority of things, impose a common destiny on men who know nothing of one another' (Sartre 179). Sartre would surely concede Marx's point that under capital 'destiny' cannot finally be 'common' because the interests and actions of those who labour and those who invest are not necessarily at one. Within commodity production, matter is not fully coherent, since it bears contradictory inscriptions and contending futures. Fitzgerald knows that 'folding beach cushions' and 'miniatures for a doll's house' are products 'of much ingenuity and toil' (65), not the least of it going on in chicle factories and canneries and that consequently, if 'toil' changes, the future latent in cushions and dolls must change. Again Sartre clarifies: '[things] possess an inert future within which we have to determine our own future. The future comes to man through things insofar as it previously came to things through man' (Sartre 178).

  For 'future' it is tempting to say 'futures', particularly of 1929, and still more particularly of 1929 viewed from 1934. It should be remembered that Tender is the Night was published in 1934, and spans the period from 1917 to the summer of 1929. It would be gratifying to see the Crash as annus mirabilis/the time of changes when 'destiny' shifted from the manifest to the several. What is striking is that, having timed Dick's dive for the summer of 1929 and having provided a glimpse of flame on Wall Street, Fitzgerald implies calmly that capital survives through structural transformation and that futures, though they should be legion, may not even number two. In a much-quoted passage describing Nicole's shopping, Fitzgerald sets global capital aboard a fast train running anarchically from Chicago to a Parisian shop window; his extended metaphor implies a crash the better to avert it:

  as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying ... She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it. (65)

  Nicole illustrates capital's tendency to recurrent crisis. Her family money 'contain[s] its own doom' because, by investing in the massive expansion of production during the post-war decade, the Warrens promote overproduction and the attendant dramatic fall in their own profit. The plot has a twist (as inces
t has two faces): Nicole's graceful buying mirrors capital's self-correcting concern for consumers and consumption. So, standing at 'the exact furthermost evolution of [her] class' (30), Accumulation's child may yet give a lesson to the daughter of Reproduction and eventually find her 'grace' in the procedure imitated in the movies. By such indirections do the imperatives of accumulation metamorphose into the necessities of reproduction. The moral is as simple as the story: the market's narrative is self-healing and absolute.

  What is initially odd about this passage is that it ignores one of its own fiercest insights: that things are the loci of more or less antagonistic connections between classes. Fitzgerald could at this point be charged with wilful amnesia, except that what he leaves out he points to. Fitzgerald indicates that if 'love-birds' come tagged 'chicle factory' then labour makes leisure. There is no need for the critic to slip an unsolicited economic sub-text into Tender is the Night, since the novel's dating ensures that 1929 shadows all events; the fact that it has so little final effect is neither ambiguous nor evasive, it is merely decisive. Fitzgerald's muffled Crash implies the continuity of capital. Labour has no future beyond consumerism because capital ensures its own vitality by switching plots.

  Once again I return to my two available master-stories - Accumulation and Reproduction. The one archaic, the other curative, each implies different kinds of subject and object. Dick's decisive dive, though less dramatic, is rather more telling than suicides from tall corporate premises. His career involves a long marination in the realm of carefully considered objects, be they beach cushions or words from a couch. His problem in 1929 is that the objects are changing as market practice and the instruments and institutions of capital change. Dick appreciates, but will not make, that particular transition. Instead he disengages himself from his marriage and from the haute bourgeoisie, old and new.