Tender is the Night

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Take a look at the beginning of this book about a love triangle. We have a young woman arriving at a beach, an out-of-the way French resort. We learn that the woman, Rosemary, is a movie starlet, fresh out of her first picture, Daddy’s Girl, a huge success. Her mother has brought her up ready to face a ruthless modern world where morality is something quaint and tragedies can be taken over.
We enter this novel, in a sense, at Rosemary’s side, walking beside her. If we’re capable of suspending our disbelief in the right way, we’re able to be her, to enjoy the story as if it’s ours. It’s a device for drawing the reader into the story. We stand in the shoes of a young girl who’s ready to be seduced, and the figure who seduces her is a man named Dick Diver.
Diver is a psychiatrist, a man whose job is to profile people, to understand their souls. His wife, Nicole, is in a sense, his patient. She’s a schizophrenic; her mind is deranged because her father raped her once, when she was a child. Somehow, the presence of Diver in her life proves therapeutic, and because of that Nicole’s family, the Warren family, which happens to be one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has seen fit to choose Dick Diver, to invest money in his career, to sponsor a sanatorium in Geneva in order to lend him an air of professional gravity.
Imagine this metaphor: Dick Diver is the author, the young novelist, and the beautiful young girl, Rosemary, is the reader, not so much any particular reader, but the ideal reader that any author imagines, a reader with a healthy, open, young mind that is waiting to be given a chord, a theme, a myth to live by. Rosemary meets Dick when he’s at the height of his prosperity. She falls in love with him, thinks the world of him . . . and because of Nicole’s wealth, Dick Diver is able to show Rosemary an enchanting world, a world of revelry punctuated by little fits of seamy intrigue. Dick gives Rosemary an adventure, the perfect adventure, an adventure that takes her right into the unique gaiety of the post-WWI era she’s growing up in. And she wants as much as she can get out of it. She wants Dick’s soul. She wants to seduce him away from his wife. And she almost does.
And then the rest of the story we see not from Rosemary’s perspective, but from Dick’s. Years have passed. His life has become dreary and professional. His wife’s recurring bouts of mental illness drain his energy. He sees Rosemary again, sleeps with her, but he can’t be the same man he was with her when he first met her.
Let me expand the metaphor again: Dick Diver is the author, Rosemary is the reader . . . and Nicole? Nicole is the subject, the story, a story that the author has chosen to marry himself to, a story that will change itself over time, just as real people change, but that will always remain thematically the same at its core.
I’m not trying to tell you that this is the secret meaning of Tender is the Night, that this is what F Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he actually wrote the book. To tell you the truth, this interpretation of the book just came to me as I was sitting here with my laptop trying to figure out what to write about this book. What I’m trying to do is to show you how I like to read books, to show you a way of engaging your imagination that has worked for me. Read Tender is the Night and try to use the artist-reader-subject metaphor as a skeleton key to open up its core meaning. There will be times when the skeleton key works for you, when it will seem brilliant. I guarantee, it will open up meanings that I didn’t notice when I read the book. And then there are times when the metaphor is a key that doesn’t fit into any lock at all. Don’t let that discourage you. Look for new explanations, see if you can develop your own imaginative key to unlocking the mysteries of the book. And look for those moments when the book needs no explanation, no symbolic code, when just the experience of reading it is pleasurable enough to sustain itself.