Violet wells's Reviews > Tender Is the Night

I was besotted with Scott and Zelda in my youth. Along with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield I read everything about them I could lay my hands on. And I loved this novel because of how much obvious autobiography it contained. And to some extent the measure of enjoyment you glean from Tender will depend on how heavily you are invested emotionally in Scott and Zelda's real-life story. Because, despite all the smokescreens, the ruse that Dick and Nicole are based on Gerald and Sarah Murphy, it's very much a portrait of their life together, or the lengthy period of their life lived in France. Except in his novel Scott makes himself a psychiatrist and saves Zelda. He reverses the pattern of her illness - makes her sick to begin with and then heals her. It's a kind of wish fulfilment fantasy on his part.

Tender is the Night took Fitzgerald thirteen years to write and for a lot of this period he was drunk and it shows, especially in the early part of the novel where his structure seems off and his focus lacks sharpness. There's a sense many passages have been transposed from notebooks, shoehorned in, rather than come about organically. Often the beautiful writing doesn't mesh seamlessly into the narrative. There are lots of sensational sideshows featuring very minor characters, characters only there, in fact, to provide these sideshows - there's a duel, an attempted murder and then a successful murder. - Tender has little of the tight technical artistry of Gatsby where there was barely a superfluous word. Neither, despite its ambition, does it achieve the scope of Gatsby largely because of its structural flaws. (Not surprising as much of his material was in the midst of happening in real life: Zelda, for example, was essentially a healthy young woman when he begun this.) However, it was his personal favourite of his books and you begin to understand why in the second half which dramatically improves when Fitzgerald hones in on his two central characters, makes them more explicitly himself and Zelda and their volatile doomed marriage. Dick, a bit of a self-satisfied bore when he's in command of his life and heralded as an organiser of gaiety, becomes more interesting when he's on the back foot. The writing improves too and there are many truly beautiful passages and insights, especially on the underlying causes of human failure. And by the end Scott has evoked a generous measure of the tragic poignancy of his marriage to Zelda.