The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Francis Scott Fitzgerald answers with an irritated question: “Why should I bother myself about them? Haven’t I enough worries of my own? You know as well as I do what has happened to them. Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.” Then, Mok tells, Francis Scott Fitzgerald pauses and concludes and moans and smiles with the saddest of smiles: “Successful authors . . . ! Oh, my God, successful authors!”

  The final line of the piece is: “Francis Scott Fitzgerald stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink.”

  † And in all those books—since he already knows how everything begins and transpires and ends—the first thing he looks for, opening them to the end, to the onomastic index, is whether there’s some new information about the writing and circumstances of Tender Is the Night, his parents’ favorite book, and his favorite book by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

  † The book that occurs to Fitzgerald just three weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, in 1925. The book that he’ll work on interruptedly and uninterruptedly for several and too many years to come.

  † In a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, dated May of that year, Fitzgerald informs him: “The happiest thought I have is of my new novel—it is something really NEW in form, idea, and structure: the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.” And in more letters to his editor and his daughter and almost anyone he crossed paths with, as the years passed: “My novel is something of a mystery, I hope,” “,” “I fear I have written another novel for writers,” “Excuse me if this letter has a dogmatic ring. I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life,” “No exclamatory ‘At last, the long awaited, etc.’ That merely creates the ‘Oh yeah’ mood in people.”

  † A year later, Fitzgerald notifies his agent Harold Ober that a fourth of the novel is finished and that he’ll send it to him by the end of the year and that it’s about “the case of that girl who shot her mother on the Pacific Coast last year.” Fitzgerald is referring there to the adolescent matricide Dorothy Ellingson.

  † This first version of what would be Tender Is the Night—which has almost nothing to do with the final version—has Francis Melarkey as protagonist, a twenty-year-old American who works in the world of film as a cinematographer and ends up murdering his domineering mother during a trip to Europe. Fitzgerald composes four or five sketches of the first part of this novel playing around with different possible titles (Our Type, The Boy Who Killed His Mother, The Melarkey Case, and The World’s Fair), but Zelda’s relapses and internments in various sanitoriums interrupt the project (and at the same time enhance it; Zelda’s illness ends up being and is The Theme of the novel) with the need for fast and easy money. So he writes stories many of which are forgettable and a few that, especially the magnificent and terrible and so very sad “One Trip Abroad,” will end up absorbed by the final version of Tender Is the Night.

  † “I was paying for it with work, that I passionately hated and found more and more difficult to do. The novel was like a dream, daily farther and farther away . . . You were gone now—I scarcely remember you that summer . . . You were going crazy and calling it genius—I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand . . . We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald in a letter for Zelda Fitzgerald that was never sent and archived with the title “Gone to the Clinique,” summer, 1930.

  † In the first version of Tender Is the Night appear the glowing American couple, Seth and Dinah Piper, who will end up transformed into Dick and Nicole Diver, the characters inspired by or respired by Gerald and Sara Murphy.

  † The young cinematographer Francis Melarkey will suffer a much more radical metamorphosis: he’ll be transformed into the young actress Rosemary Hoyt (inspired by one Lois Moran, a fan of the writer, a young starlet of seventeen—and protégée of Samuel Goldwyn—with whom Fitzgerald flirts, to Zelda’s despair, without it ever coming to anything serious beyond him recommending her books indispensable for her education.

  † After many changes and protests and counter-protests and letters asking for help and time and pity (Gerald Murphy remembers having seen Fitzgerald throw a version of the novel, page after page, like someone tearing the petals from a flower, into the waters of the Mediterranean), the awaited Tender Is the Night makes its debut in 1934.

  † Its title comes from “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats and wins out—Fitzgerald always vacillated over his titles until the last minute and was never entirely satisfied with the final choice—over the alternatives of The Drunkard’s Holiday, Dr. Diver’s Holiday, and Richard Diver (He would’ve been thrilled if the novel had been called Richard Diver, if the novel had the name of a person and a character, like those nineteenth-century novels in which a name makes all the difference.)

  † Tender Is the Night arrives in bookstores immediately following its serialization in four parts in Scribner’s Magazine, when nobody is expecting it except to say that it wasn’t what they were expecting and, at the same time, to communicate in reviews and opinion pieces that it was exactly what was to be expected from Fitzgerald, that nothing else, or nothing more, could be expected from him. Fitzgerald was a modern writer and “of his time” and now he was suffering the fate of all “generational” writers: degeneration. Fitzgerald—they reproach him—has suddenly become antiquated, telling stories that seem to take place in museums where the past that’s offered is too near and, as such, not worth the cost of inhaling its dust and allergens and, much less, paying for the ticket to revisit it. So, Tender Is the Night, in bookstore displays, as if stamped with the scarlet letter of warning that says, “Please don’t touch.” And readers don’t touch it.

  † Tender Is the Night quickly sells a first edition of 7,600 copies at $2.50 and lands at number ten on the bestseller list. Then, before long, it’s pushed off by rather lukewarm reviews that reproach its lack of political and social relevance, for occupying itself with decadent millionaires sunning themselves in Europe during the days of the Great Depression, which is also Fitzgerald’s personal Great Depression, a writer so generational that he even suffers the ills and atones for the sins of his generation. Fitzgerald is the messenger and storyteller who must be killed for having chronicled the good and irresponsible times of a generation that he never entirely belonged to. That “rotten crowd,” those shady and resplendent specimens who for Nick Carraway—suddenly seeing and understanding everything, in the elegiac finale of The Great Gatsby—are nothing but careless individuals for whom everyone else, in exchange for perfumed banknotes, picks up and puts back together the pieces of all the things they break. They also question its structure with the long central flashback. And they consider the decadence and fall of Dick Diver as excessively melodramatic and implausible. And (he agrees about this) they point out that the psychological/psychoanalytic aspects of the thing are naïve and approached in a childish and facile way, like in those movies with the divan and the pipe and the bust of Sigmund Freud where the patients comprehend the keys to their neurosis all at once, with analypsis of liquid images, that seem filmed underwater, as if wanting to signify that the subconscious is something submarine and stormy, hidden under the apparently calm surface of the conscience. One reviewer—maybe infected by the Freudian spores of the novel—ends up interpreting that Dick Diver is Fitzgerald and the mad Nicole Diver is nothing but “that whistling social system”: the incarnation of her time and youth and generation, lost forever. And that it’s now time for Fitzgerald—if he wants to grow as
a writer—to stop attending to Nicole Diver. And he closes his diagnosis with the following words: “And finally a not too personal postscript for the author. Dear Mr. Fitzgerald: you can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella.”

  † The heavyweight intellectual and rediscoverer of William Faulkner, Malcolm Crowley, states that “Tender is the Night is a good novel that puzzles you and ends up making you a little angry because it isn’t a great novel also.”

  † Fitzgerald, desperate, insecure about everything, tries to fix what he can, to save the furniture, scoop out water while everyone runs for the lifeboats. Fitzgerald sends a telegraph, in desperate caps, to Bennett Cerf, trying to convince him to launch an economical and corrected edition of Tender Is the Night in the Modern Library collection: “DO YOU THINK THAT ONCE A BOOK IS PUBLISHED IT IS FOREVER CRYSTALLIZED?” almost begging, asking them that they tell him that no, that there’s still time. And he doesn’t realize that it’s impossible to improve it. Because the truly terrible thing about Tender Is the Night—the authentically disturbing and insurmountable thing—is that in it there is no Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby or Cecilia Brady from The Last Tycoon. In Tender Is the Night there is no narrator functioning as an intermediary or filter or shield. The reader receives the radiation of the Divers & Co.—unlike what happens with the nebulous Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald seems to insist that we know everything about Dick and Nicole—without anesthesia, directly, point blank. And it hurts. Gatsby seeks to repeat the past; the Divers only want to stop repeating their eternal present. Fitzgerald restructures the novel chronologically, begs and doesn’t succeed in getting them to publish a second version (his wish will be granted in 1951, posthumously, and the result does nothing but damage what was already good and, fortunately, that mutation of Tender Is the Night will be put definitively out of circulation by 1959), and ends up realizing that what he does doesn’t interest him anymore.

  And night falls.

  † One year after Tender Is the Night, a final volume of stories, the magnificent Taps at Reveille (1935), including such masterpieces as “Crazy Sunday,” “The Last of the Belles,” and “Babylon Revisited,” is received as the terminal X-ray, the point of no return, which marks Fitzgerald as an incurable patient, victim of a “period” sickness that nobody contracts and that, consequently, nobody fears or has to waste any time looking for a magic cure for anymore.

  † In a letter to the literary critic Philip Lenhart dated April 1934, Fitzgerald says that, “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force, but Tender Is the Night is a confession of faith.”

  † Tender Is the Night as the Great Psycho-American Novel: Sara and Gerald Murphy turn into Nicole and Dick Diver who turn into Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald (who turn into his—he who is reading it again, “studying it”—own parents), and who knows how many thousands of couples roaming around, reading it, feeling worse and worse the better they read it.

  † And sua culpa: he read Tender Is the Night for the first time—long after he should’ve done so, probably because children tend to put off facing their parents’ passions as long as possible, out of fear of what they’ll find there—the way someone contracts a virus. As if its vaudeville vertigo turned fever were something that settled inside the reader little by little until it intoxicated him. Compared with the perfection of The Great Gatsby (which at its peak is able to produce the mildest and most pleasant of post-party hangovers), Tender Is the Night, in the beginning, feels like one of those interminable colds that climbs into bed with you and makes you feel and see things that aren’t there. But really yes they are there, just that, when you’re healthy, you can’t see them. Sanity is made (and exists for people who function more or less properly) of defense mechanisms like these.

  † Attempting a synopsis of Tender Is the Night that, inevitably, will read (and more than one reader will, no doubt, skip it) like climbing onto the most dizzying of carnival rides. A frenzy of names and places and ports that open and close and fatal acts (incest, murder) and terrible moments like the chilling hysterical episode of Nicole Diver in the bathroom (ah, the bathroom: for his parents and for many parents, a classic and frequent realm of debate. Something strange about that, and did they argue in bathrooms for reasons of hygiene, to eliminate corporeal waste? Is arguing in bathrooms like committing murder in a library or making love in the stables?). Bathroom episode—Nicole wailing, her cry echoing off the tiles—that produces in the young and easy-in-love Rosemary Hoyt, involuntary witness of the horror, the irrepressible urge (which also disconcerted more than one critic) to get out of there and almost not return to the novel until near its end. At which point, encountering Dick again, Rosemary understands that this is no longer the man with whom she fell in love—that he’s changed. And yet, when Dick asks her if he seems different, she lies that no, that he’s just like he was, like himself. To which Dick—with a sad smile, unequivocally Fitzgeraldian, the smile that, unlike Jay Gatsby, knows that the past can’t be repeated—responds: “Did you hear I’d gone into a process of deterioration? . . . It is true. 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.”

  How does Dick Diver end up? Alone, with an occasional girlfriend, practicing at small rural offices, “in one town or another,” writing a book always “in a process of completion.”

  Like him, more or less.

  Just that he’s always in the process of beginning.

  † He’s going to try it. The synopsis of Tender Is the Night. Here goes: a novel about the misuse of creative promise. Something like that. It tells the story of Dick Diver, a young American psychologist, studying in Zurich in 1917 (this is the second—and in reverse—part of the novel in the first and definitive version after Fitzgerald spent a few years, as mentioned, having the book be reordered to locate it, chronologically, at the beginning of the book). Diver shows interest in the case of Nicole Warren, a beautiful and wealthy and schizophrenic American. Why? Because her loving father slept with her. As Nicole recovers she, also, becomes more dependent on Dick, whom she ends up marrying. And maintaining. The doctor-patient relationship is translated into married life and, seeing himself obliged to care for her, Dick not only shelves the development of his “intellectual and professional life” but, in addition, discovers that he doesn’t love her like a husband, but like someone resigned to watching a sadomasochistic butterfly always begging to be stabbed with a pin so that she can later be admired. All the time. Dick and Nicole have two children and they live a good life in the French Riviera (first part of the novel). There, their friends include Abe North (alcoholic musician who, like Dick, hasn’t achieved the heights of all that was expected of him when he was a young prodigy composer) and who, grand finale, ends up getting murdered in a bar in Paris. A black man dies too. Escape there. Enter over there. So, the impeccable life, thanks to Nicole’s money, of Dick as professional host collapses in slow motion, drink in hand. But everything begins to tremble and events precipitate with the arrival of the young actress—symbol of all dreams yet to be realized and to come true—Rosemary Hoyt. Dick falls in love with the girl (or wants to believe he’s in love), and begins to drink more than he eats; and he gets into trouble in bars in Rome; and his career comes crashing down. Fortunately or not, Nicole falls in love with Tommy Barban, a French mercenary and member of her eternally vacationing circle. And Nicole ends up divorcing Dick, who returns to the United States to lead a most banal and mediocre and maybe more or less happy existence.

  † Note: Fitzgerald (and Zelda) reveled as if possessed in diving off cliffs or swimming pool diving boards. They dove into the void and into the sea and from the rocks and, in the summer of 1926, in front of the increasingly terrified Sara and Gerald Murphy, they did it many times. Fitzgerald’s stories and novels overflow with aquatic surfaces always ready to be altered, rippled, splashed.

  He always found it funny that Dick Diver, in Spanis
h, can be translated as imbécil clavadista.

  The tiny distance and brief instant between dive and impact.

  † The EX LIBRIS in Fitzgerald’s books shows a skeleton wearing a smoking jacket dancing in a tempest of confetti and serpents, holding a mask in one hand and a saxophone in the other. High above him reads the legend BE YOUR AGE. Which could be taken to mean either “Belong to your time” or “Act your age.” Easy to say, hard to do. Easy to write, hard to live.

  † What could his parents—in full-on process of deterioration, their morale broken—have seen in Tender Is the Night? What could their systematic serial reading of the novel—as if searching for a secret code, an explanation for everything in their world—have helped them with? Maybe, seeing themselves reflected in the Divers just as the Murphys (though they deny it) saw themselves reflected in the Divers, his parents were able to understand themselves better and maybe forgive themselves. Or perhaps, to the contrary, the bourgeoisie and comfortable image reflected back to them by that black and magic mirror—the warning from a Lost Generation that under no circumstance should they lose their generation again—did nothing but harden their respective positions and they read that book the way other people read Sun Tzu or Von Clausewitz. As a call to arms.

  † His parents: maybe it was mutual boredom and the need for powerful emotions and the idea that a trend of political and social compromise first and armed conflict later was emerging, which made it so that, in their eyes, Tender Is the Night was in the first place a kind of example to follow and overcome, and later a bad example to track down and eliminate.

  † But everyone knows that adults act like children—first they want the best version or model of what others have and, later, they only want what nobody else has.

  † Which would explain his parents’ passage from bon vivants to killing machines, or something like that.