Geoff Dyer: Working the Room
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Tender is the Night*
It was The Great Gatsby we were 'doing' for A-level, not Tender is the Night,
but my English teacher got me to read it anyway. I was seventeen and remembered
practically nothing about it - but I never quite forgot it.
This, it turns out, is a not uncommon reaction, or at
least a variant of a fairly common one. Putting into practice an idea he'd
'got from Conrad's preface to The Nigger', Fitzgerald believed that 'the
purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects
in the reader's mind'. He was responding to some surly comments about Tender
from Hemingway; who, as if succumbing to exactly these 'lingering after-effects',
later told Max Perkins of a 'strange thing' about Fitzgerald, namely that
'in retrospect his Tender is the Night gets better and better'. John Updike
bounces this kind of response back into the works themselves. 'So often in
Fitzgerald,' he writes, 'we have only the afterglow of a dream to see by.'
I don't remember when I read Tender for the second time.
Even the note scribbled in the front of my Penguin edition is uncertain:
'Read 2, 3 times (?) before this, Paris, April/May 92.' I had gone to Paris
in 1991 to write a novel which, I hoped, was going to be a contemporary version
of Tender is the Night, so the afterglow of those undated re-readings was,
evidently; still strong. Appropriately enough I made little progress with
this novel and, after a visit to the battle-fields of northern France, abandoned
it in favor of a book about the Great War. With this in mind it is hardly
surprising that, when I re-read Tender in the spring of 1992, it seemed a
book saturated in the aftermath of the First World War or - as Fitzgerald
himself put it - 'the broken universe of the war's ending'.
'This Western front business couldn't be done again, not
for a long time,' Dick explains during a visit to the battlefields of the
Western Front in 1925. 'This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous
sureties and the exact relation between the classes.' That's the passage
that always gets quoted, but the book is dominated throughout by what Dick
terms, in a 'half-ironic phrase: Non-combatant's shell-shock'. The battlefields
of northern France, where, as Dick explains, the dead lay 'like a million
bloody rugs', are twinned; through this image, with the Riviera and 'its
bright tan prayer rug of a beach'.
Having got the Great War out of my system, I did eventually
write my Paris novel, but I did not actually read Tender again until last
week, when I did so specifically to write this piece. The book I encountered
this time around was radically different to the one I had read before. Quite
literally: up until then I had always read the version re-organized by Fitzgerald,
edited by Malcolm Cowley and first published in 1951. This time I read the
original version, beginning not with Dick encountering the wounded on his
way to Zurich but with Rosemary's first glimpse of the Divers on the French
Riviera.
From Hemingway on, Fitzgerald's fellow-writers have felt
free to be smugly superior about his achievements. In the most wonderfully
snobby aside of all, E.M. Cioran remarks on what seems 'an incomprehensible
thing to me: T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald that he had read The Great Gatsby
three times!' After watching the movie of Tender - 'a very good film of a
rather poor book' - Evelyn Waugh concluded, ambivalently, that 'the enormously
expensive apparatus of the film studio can produce nothing as valuable as
can one half-tipsy Yank with a typewriter'. For Gore Vidal 'very little'
of what the 'barely literate' Fitzgerald wrote 'has any great value as literature'.
On this latest re-reading I feared, at first, that he
was right. In places the writing in these early pages is strikingly inept,
as when Rosemary, feeling the 'impactive scrutiny' of strangers on the beach,
notices the 'brash navel' and 'facetious whiskers' of a· man with
a monocle. It all felt like someone trying to make his writing interesting
- what Nick Carraway calls 'a strained counterfeit of perfect ease' - and
succeeding only in drawing attention to its failing. Writing often works
best when you are oblivious to it, when you respond to its effects Without
being conscious of how they are achieved. And so it was here. After that
initially uncomfortable period of settling in, I fell under Fitzgerald's
tender spell as subtly as Dick's guests fall under their host's. His gift
for making people believe in the world he creates while 'leaving little communicable
memory of what he had said or done' is of a piece with the effect - more
accurately, the lingering after-effect - of Tender itself. Other incidental
observations hint at this quality of evocative reverberation. Utterly infatuated,
Rosemary catches only the gist of Dick's sentences and supplies 'the rest
from her unconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle
with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind'
.
It is often thought that Fitzgerald was as besotted by
elegance and the wealth on which it is predicated as the teenage Rosemary
is by Dick. This is such a distorting Simplification of an author who read
Marx and conceived of Dick as 'a man like myself', 'a communist-liberal-idealist,
a moralist in revolt', that one wonders at its capacity to persist. In a
letter of 1938 Fitzgerald wrote, 'I have never been able to forgive the rich
for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.' He was the
most materialist of romantics, the most romantic of materialists. As representatives
of the 'furthermost evolution of a class' the Divers incarnate a way of life
which, in its apparent transcendence of all material concerns, is enviably
idyllic. But Fitzgerald was one of the first writers to grasp the enervating
horror of infinite leisure (in Jane Austen it is simply assumed). Given limitless
time and freedom everything, as Dick eventually blurts out at Mary North,
comes to seem 'damned dull'. Realizing the extent to which Nicole's immense
wealth serves 'to belittle his own work', Dick sits 'listening to the buzz
of the electric clock, listening to time'. Not the time of striking hours
but blank, undifferentiated time. In this eternity of leisure it is inevitable
that Dick, though conscious that he has 'lost himself', cannot 'tell the
hour when, or the day or the week, or the month or the year'.
About the larger system of global degradation on which
this leisure and its attendant virtues of poise and elegance depend, Fitzgerald
is, by contrast, explicit and exact: for Nicole's sake, 'girls canned tomatoes
in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed
Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled
out of patent rights in new tractors - these were some of the people who
gave a tithe to Nicole . . .' Poise itself is thereby tainted by the exploitation
that finances its cultivation.
If poise and degradation are inescapably entwined then
so too - as in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' from which Fitzgerald took his
title - are rapture and despondency, celebration and lament. Early on in
the novel Nicole observes one of Dick's 'most characteristic moods', 'the
excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by
his own form of melancholy, which he never displayed but at which she guessed'.
From this cocktail of entangled emotions emerges what Philip Larkin - in
'For Sidney Bechet', another, very different elegy for his own idea of the
jazz age - calls the 'long-haired grief and scored pity' of the book. Writing
it demanded from Fitzgerald a willingness to believe again in every promise
of happiness that had been broken by his life.
If the precise trajectory of Dick's failure becomes more
difficult to trace with every re-reading, this is a tribute to the book's
subtlety rather than an indication of a lack. Dick's disintegration is, of
course, a prism refracting Fitzgerald's own. Indeed, the three-way relation
between the fictional world Fitzgerald created, the Fitzgeralds as they actually
were, and the synthetic myth of the Fitzgeralds that emerged from this inter-relation
is as central to the enduring popularity of Fitzgerald's work as it is to
the dissenting view that his popularity is based on meagre literary merit.
Rather than disentangling these strands consider, for a moment, just how
intimately they are entwined.
While not portraits of Sara and Gerald Murphy, Nicole
and Dick are partly derived from them (Hemingway's initial objections to
the book had primarily to do with this). At the same time, as John O'Hara
pointed out, 'sooner or later his characters always come back to being Fitzgerald
characters in a Fitzgerald world ... Dick Diver ended up as a tall Fitzgerald.'
This protean connection between the lived and the fictive is suggested by
Rebecca West's response to a request for her remembered impressions of Zelda.
West had met the Fitzgeralds on her first visit to New
York in 1923-4 and again on the Riviera in 1926. Zelda, West wrote in 1963,
'was very plain ... She was standing with her back to me, and her hair was
quite lovely, it glistened like a child's. Her face had a certain craggy
homeliness. There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in
Gericaults pictures of the insane.' As West continued to mull over the past
a 'very unpleasant memory' came to mind of how Zelda 'had flapped her arms
and looked very uncouth as she talked about her ballet ambitions. The odd
thing to me always was that Scott Fitzgerald . . . should have liked someone
who was so inelegant. But she was not at all unlikeable. There was something
very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from
ones own point of view, only from hers.'
Irrespective of the physical accuracy of West's description
of Zelda this seems to me the single most penetrating insight we have - not
into Fitzgerald but into his art (especially if we bear in mind an earlier
occasion when West, in precisely the style advocated by Fitzgerald, commented
on 'the after-image' of Zelda's face). It reveals the humming circuitry of
an artist's imaginative life. In late 1935 Gerald Murphy conceded to Fitzgerald
'that what you said in Tender is the Night was true. Only the invented part
of our life - the unreal part - has had any scheme, any beauty:' During her
first encounters with Dick, Rosemary is aware of 'an act of creation different
from any she had known'; 'the intensely calculated perfection' of the Villa
Diana becomes evident 'through such minute failures as the chance apparition
of a maid in the background or the perversity of a cork'. West's incidental
X-ray reveals the fundamental urge - the creative ontology of the writer
- behind these variously arranged contrivings. If Fitzgerald's fascination
with wealth derived in part from being, as he insisted, 'a poor boy In a
rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school', then it is not surprising
to find that elegance and beauty share a similar proximity to plainness and
inelegance. In comparable style, his famous lyrical flourishes work best
when earthed in the actual and immediate. To make the same point in terms
of the symbolic geography of The Great Gatsby, the Significance of Gatsbys
mansion lies not simply in its 'meretricious beauty' but in its tragic proximity
to the ash-heaps of Wilson's garage. By the time of Tender is the Night this
kind of topographic scheme has been subtly dissolved, psychologically initialized.
The lyrical and beautiful are constantly flickering into the abject and desolate.
At this point I need to go back to the novel I went to Paris to write. Taking
an aspect of Tender and adapting it for my own needs, I wanted to write a
book about a failure which also depicted an idyllic period in the life of
that failure - but I kept failing to write it. Asked if I am disciplined
in my working habits I always respond that I am actively hostile to the idea
of writers lashing themselves to their desks for six hours a day, irrespective
of how they feel. I write when I feel
like it, don't when I don't. My inability to make any progress with my Paris
novel, however, did make me suspect that I had become too self-indulgent,
too dissolute in my ways. Perhaps I had been seduced by the version of creativity
personified by the junkie saxophonist Art Pepper, who claimed he 'never studied,
never practiced
. . . All I had to do was reach for it.' I kept telling myself that the material
I was dealing with was too personal, that I wasn't ready to face it, but
I also worried that I simply lacked self-discipline. Failure to write the
book gave rise to a less specific sense of failure, so generalized, in fact,
that it became part of my life. And then, quite suddenly, without any conscious
effort, I began writing the book. It came fairly easily and, I realized quickly,
the delay in writing the book – the earlier failure to write it - became
an active part in its composition. All sorts of things that had happened
in the interim found their place in the book, the most important of which
were my experiences with MDMA, or Ecstasy Fitzgerald, as we all know, was
an alcoholic; booze flows like a river through Tender. At that time there
was a glamour and promise about drinking that has long since dissipated.
In a contemporary on text such glamour and promise could only be provided
by drugs and so, naturally, the characters in my Paris Trance all take E.
On Rosemary's first evening at the Divers' the guests gather for dinner.
'They had been at table half an hour and a perceptible change had set in
- person by person had given up something, a preoccupation, an anxiety; a
suspicion, and now they were only their best selves and the Divers' guests
.. .' This is followed by one of the most famous scenes in the book:
• This piece was commissioned by The American Scholar for
their Rereading series. They responded to the draft I sent in by asking if
I could make it more personal, so some of what's here is me being obedient,
not self-indulgent! (Note added 2010.)
