This Day in Literary History ("Tender is the Night" Published)

April 12, 1934—After initial serialization, Scribners published Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of all his works, this cost the most. No, not us, but Scott—in the heartache that inspired it and in its indifferent reception by critics and the public. 

It took Fitzgerald nine years to follow up on The Great Gatsby—the longest gestation period of any of his five novels. (The last, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.) 

The writer's painstaking revisions accounted for some of the delay, but most of it resulted from emotional chaos, as his personal and financial fortunes began to decline almost simultaneously. 

Two false starts left Fitzgerald stymied as he churned out stories that he regarded as well-paid hack work, all in an attempt to provide for his suddenly pressing family obligations. In 1930, Scott’s wife Zelda had been diagnosed with schizophrenia (many observers now believe this assessment was mistaken, and that in fact she suffered from bipolar disorder). 

This triggered the principal thread in the manuscript Fitzgerald finally worked through in earnest in 1932 and 1933. It allowed him to identify more strongly with the golden couple at the heart of the tale, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his beautiful wife, his former patient Nicole – characters originally based on the expatriate American painter-socialite Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara. 

 Along with this, he poured a host of the people and incidents that had transformed him from the hopeful young author of This Side of Paradise to a middle-aged man heading toward what he called in one of his short stories “Emotional Bankruptcy”: his intense relationship with Hollywood actress Lois Moran, an affair of Zelda’s, the deaths of his father and Ring Lardner, even a drunken incident of his own that resulted in his beating by Italian police. 

(The writer’s exhaustion can be seen fairly clearly in the photo accompanying this posting, taken in 1937, just three years after publication of this book.) 

Scott poured his hardest work into the project. He could have really used a financial windfall from it. Only two months before publication, Zelda suffered her third nervous breakdown. After a month, she had been transferred to Craig House, an almost park-like hospital in Beacon, N.Y., that, she maintained, was far more expensive than Scott could afford. 

Fitzgerald’s hopes were quickly dashed. Mired in the Depression, Americans could care less about the troubles of affluent expatriates on the Riviera. 

Moreover, though some reviewers, such as Mary Colum and Gilbert Seldes, treated it well, much of the rest of the critical establishment had become so preoccupied with class if not Communism that Fitzgerald’s fascination with the wealthy seemed downright retrograde. 

Other writers, if not the general public, have treated Fitzgerald’s novel as a success d’estime. John O’Hara proofread Tender in galleys, and it is easy to see the protagonist of his own first novel, Appointment in Samarra, as a Gibbsville counterpart to Dick Diver on his Riviera drunkard’s holiday. Nearly 60 years later, in its portrait of a young couple, admired by friends but increasingly distant from each other, Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls also clearly echoes Tender. 

For myself, The Great Gatsby is the most exhilarating and perfect of Fitzgerald’s books, but Tender Is the Night cleaves to the heart the most, in its warnings about wasted potential and disillusionment when youthful dreams do not materialize. 

One of the best summaries of the book’s virtues came from the author’s own troubled muse. In a letter sent at the time of publication, Zelda cheered up her husband with a letter that was as lucid and poignant as her marital relation at close quarters had been chaotic and mutually damaging, noting the book was "a swell evokation (sic) of an epoch and a very masterly presentation of tragedies sprung from the beliefs (or lack of them) of those times which bloomed from the seeds of despair planted by the war and of the circumstances dependent on the adjustment of logical story." 

(The letter comes from Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Jackson W. Bryar and Cathy W. Barks.)

 For a sense of what Zelda meant, you should of course turn to the novel, but by all means also see the 1985 six-hour miniseries adaptation written by Dennis Potter (yes, of Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Policeman fame). 

Broadcast by the BBC and, in the U.S., by Showtime, it accords Fitzgerald’s novel the ruminative, sad, disillusioned treatment it deserved—and nowhere more so than when Peter Strauss, as Dick Diver, walks across a World War I battlefield and says mournfully, "All my beautiful, lovely, safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love." 

This moment sums up the psychic shock that conflict delivered to the Lost Generation, and expresses, perhaps better than he knows it, the protagonist and author riven by that fallen world. 

The dominant chord of Fitzgerald’s writing—and the quality sought most relentlessly and achieved only fitfully by his characters—was grace, a mysterious spiritual phenomenon that he had learned as a Catholic schoolboy. 

All the sadder, then, when his request to be buried next to his father in St. Mary’s Church in suburban Maryland was refused by church officials at the time because Scott had become a lapsed Catholic.

Thirty-five years after his death, however, Scott and Zelda’s daughter Scottie succeeded in having her parents’ remains exhumed and reburied in accordance with her father’s wishes. 

William Cardinal Baum delivered a profoundly moving address at the ceremony that captured the underlying power of the novelist’s fiction—and certainly of Tender Is the Night—when he described Fitzgerald as "an artist who was able, with lucidity and poetic imagination, to portray the struggle between grace and death.” Fitzgerald experienced, the cardinal correctly concluded, “the mystery of suffering, and we hope, the power of God’s grace.”