Flashback, December 1924: The Scott Fitzgerald Roman Misadventure That Inspired ‘Tender Is the Night’

Shortly before Christmas 1924, in the midst of trying to finish the crucial last edits of the novel he hoped would cement his literary reputation and lift his finances, F. Scott Fitzgerald engaged in a drunken quarrel in Rome that ended up with him being beaten by the carabinieri, or the national police force.

The American was so embarrassed that he avoided writing or talking in anything more than general terms about this incident that brought out the worst instincts of himself and the nation he was visiting. The fullest description, in fact, found its way into the book he produced, at great emotional cost, a decade later, the last novel he completed in his life: Tender is the Night.

Riotous misadventures on Long Island had already delayed progress on The Great Gatsby. He came with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie to the French Riviera in the belief that he could live more cheaply abroad than in the United States, and he wanted to concentrate on his third novel instead of being forced to churn out short fiction that merely satisfied the couple’s needs to meet their mounting expenses. 

(See my blog post from 15 years ago on his tongue-in-cheek essay from the spring of 1924, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”)

But living beyond their means continued to plague the couple. And this time, there was an additional complication: while Scott sat at his typewriter, providing his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins with rewritten passages that would bring Jay Gatsby into greater focus for readers, Zelda—with no creative outlet to occupy her time—became infatuated with a French aviator, in an affair that threatened the marriage.

Partly to satisfy Zelda, who wanted to see the sights associated with the Henry James novel Roderick Hudson, the Fitzgeralds visited Rome in November. The first time they had gone there, three years before, Scott had not found the “Eternal City” at all to his liking, with their flea-infested hotel suite provoking his scorn. This time, it proved near-catastrophic.

The novelist found a city that had changed for the worse, and was spiraling downward by the day. Benito Mussolini’s insurrection in 1922 had brought him to power, and right after New Year’s Day in 1925, he delivered a speech to the Italian parliament in which he took personal responsibility for violence staged by his “blackshirts” and began dismantling the last remaining shreds of democracy in the nation.

It was not a good environment for a foreigner to be involved in an altercation.

Exactly when this incident occurred is uncertain, but it can be placed after December 20, when Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins:

“I'm a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight & I'll probably write you a long letter. We're living in a small, unfashionable but most comfortable hotel at $525.00 a month including tips, meals etc. Rome does not particularly interest me but its (sic) a big year here, and early in the spring we're going to Paris. [...] I've got a new novel to write—title and all, that'll take about a year. Meanwhile, I don't want to start it until this is out & meanwhile I'll do short stories for money.”

If you’re like me, knowing what Fitzgerald could be like, your antenna might rise when you come across that statement about being “a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight.” It didn’t take long for him to go from being buzzed to being idiotically and violently intoxicated.

Fitzgerald’s reference to the incident came in the new year—but he still couldn’t tell agent Harold Ober exactly what bothered him about Italy this time: "I hate Italy and the Italiens [sic], so violently that I can't bring myself to write about them for the Post."

A note that Fitzgerald wrote in 1929—spare but suggestive—implies depths of antipathy not previously expressed: “After I — after a thing that happened to me in Rome I used to imagine whole auditoriums filled with the flower of Italy, and me with a machine gun concealed on the stage. All ready. Curtain up. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.”

This incident would be just one more stop along the way of “The Drunkard’s Progress” (a 19^th-century temperance pamphlet that could have served as the story of Fitzgerald’s life), except that the novelist used it as a pivotal point in his narrative for Tender is the Night.

One major change that Fitzgerald made in transforming this imbroglio from fact to fiction was in moving the date: from the mid 1920s to closer to the Great Crash. For Dick Diver, as for America, hard times are about to arrive.

Though there are already warning signs that Dick’s drinking is affecting his psychiatric practice, the breakup of his affair with Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt set off reactions that push him to fisticuffs. An evening in a cabaret is marked by the erosion of his faculties and reason: “a distinct lesion of his own vitality,” followed by Dick progressively turning “pale and somewhat noisy,” his “unwilling body” while dancing, then an argument with taxi drivers over his projective fare, slurred speech, shoves and wild swings that end with him at a police station, where his beating bears all the hallmarks of the author’s lived experience:

“[E] ven as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.”

Dick’s request for help from “Baby” Warren, the older, disapproving older sister of his wife Nicole—the relative who holds the key to the family’s, and his, finances—becomes the hinge point of the plot: 

“It had been a hard night but she [Baby Warren] had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick's previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use."

From here on, as the mental health of Nicole—a former patient of his whom Dick had fallen in love with before marrying—improves, Dick’s drinking worsens. So much of his energy had been devoted to watching over her that he had plunged into what Fitzgerald called, in the title of another of his stories, “emotional bankruptcy.”

As I related in this prior post, Tender is the Night brought mixed reviews and poor sales upon publication. The struggles of an affluent expatriate couple in the Roaring Twenties struck many as out of tune with what average Americans were enduring in the Great Depression, and the novel’s shifts in time and point of view demanded far more than many readers were prepared to give.

Today, we can better appreciate Tender for what it is: an unexpectedly tough-minded critique of the very rich, scenes from a marriage of a golden couple that modulate from love to dissolution, and with Fitzgerald’s creative alchemy transforming the ugly circumstances of his life into poignant and beautiful art.

Though Fitzgerald had over the years lapsed from the Catholicism of his childhood and youth, perhaps he pondered the account of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30—a parable as applicable to himself as to the once-promising psychiatrist he was bringing to life.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, With Good Words to Live By)

"In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat."—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Tender Is the Night (1934)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the Consequences of Not Thinking for Yourself)

“Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”— American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Tender is the Night (1934)

I came upon this quote accidentally, but with a thrill of re-discovery. A quotation from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, much like a lyric from a Stephen Sondheim musical, may convey one quality in isolation—wittiness, say, or gracefulness—and quite another in its original context, where layers of irony and reverberations against the larger work matter.

So it happens with this passage late in Tender is the Night. By themselves, this sentence might simply read like the author’s general warning to the reader. But within the context of the novel—the devolution of a love story, amid what Fitzgerald called, as the title of one of his short stories, “emotional bankruptcy” —it is the interior monologue of a sexual-abuse victim and mental-health patient moving toward autonomy. Yet that personal freedom comes at the expense of a husband whose energy and skills atrophy as he cares for his wife’s psychological needs.

As a child, Nicole Warren was molested by her father Devereaux Warren, a rich industrialist. The family makes it possible for Dick Diver, a scholarship student in college, to own his own clinic, facilitating, despite his intention to stay financially independent, his ability to wed Nicole.

Over a decade, a transfer of vitality takes place, with Nicole growing stronger and Dick more fragile. Following Dick’s affair with a Hollywood starlet that the Divers met on the Riviera and alcoholism increasingly consuming him, Nicole is ready to move the marriage further toward its dissolution, as she contemplates her own affair.

The verbs that Nicole summons—“discipline,” “pervert,” “sterilize” and “civilize”—were part and parcel of the growing interest in psychiatry that many Americans (including Fitzgerald) were developing in the Twenties and Thirties. 

“Pervert” signals sexual corruption—not just Nicole’s father but also, it grows on the reader gradually, Dick, whose interest in young teenage girls—starting with his patient Nicole, then proceeding in turn to actress Rosemary Hoyt, a patient at his Swiss clinic, and, in the novel’s conclusion, a young woman he seduces in upstate New York--becomes more and more obvious and dismaying.

“Discipline” implies punishment intended to correct misbehavior and instill adherence to rules of order. But that is not the case with Devereaux Warren, who had hoped that he could make Nicole yield to his wanton impulses, not to curb hers.

This passage takes on added meaning because of its relationship to Fitzgerald’s life. To the extent that he could enter into a feminine consciousness at all, it was due in no small part to his heavy use of his wife Zelda’s thoughts expressed through her journal and letters.

But it was not simply a matter of appropriating her phrases that Fitzgerald was up to. Just as Nicole was trying to carve a life apart from Dick, Zelda was trying to do so professionally from Scott—first disastrously through ballet dancing, then (equally so, in terms of her relationship with Scott) as a writer, then at last, fleetingly, as a painter, the medium in which she was neither too old to begin nor in direct competition with her husband.

Nicole is about to leave behind the two father figures who have directed her life to date—not just Devereaux Warren but also Dick Diver. Dick had assumed the paternalistic role that Mr. Warren forfeited as soon as he exploited Nicole. But safeguarding her health has become all too entangled with his occupation, as indicated by two verbs in the above paragraph, “sterilize” and “civilize.”

Nicole’s molestation requires Dick to somehow clean her psychic wounds—an effort rendered difficult, even exhausting, because of her periodic breakdowns. Moreover, Dr. Diver would have to recognize this as a problem that the new “science” of psychoanalysis was only discovering, as indicated by Sigmund Freud major title of the time, Civilization and Its Discontents.

But Dick’s stewardship has come at the price of repressing her natural strength. For as long as he is viewed as sober and responsible, Nicole must accede to his wishes.

But a drunken spree leading to Dick’s arrest and beating by Italian police upends the couple’s parent-child relationship. Nicole’s multiple resentments over the years—over yielding to his wishes and, more recently, over his affair with Rosemary—now lead her to embark on an affair with the aviator Tommy Barban (whose name strongly suggests “barbarian,” an emblem of the natural state that Dick can no longer prevent her from reaching toward).

Tender is the Night does not have the soaring magic of The Great Gatsby. But it has so many subtle and graceful passages such as today’s quote that it repays periodic rereading.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Jay McInerney, on Being ‘Intimate With Loss’)

“Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.”— Jay McInerney, Brightness Falls (1992)

It’s hard to think of Jay McInerney—born on this date 60 years ago in Hartford, Conn.—as being in the last stage of middle age. He burst on the scene 30 years ago with Bright Lights, Big City, a novel written entirely in the second person, in the consciousness of a twentysomething driven to seriocomic extremes by cocaine addiction. A bestseller, it was soon adapted to film, with Michael J. Fox in the lead.

At a lecture appearance at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) n the early 1990s, McInerney recalled, he had not been initially forthcoming about how well he understood cocaine use. He could only admit the full extent of his problem now, he said, because at the time of the book's publication, there was still a stigma associated with this addiction.

Surviving success so immense at so young an age is difficult, and McInerney’s private life (notably, four marriages) has made him rich fodder for literary gossip, as evidenced in this 2000 article by Lynn Barber in the British newspaper The Guardian. The unkind literary consensus seems to be that he peaked artistically with his first book.

McInerney disagrees. At that FDU appearance, I asked him afterward which of his books was his favorite. “I think this latest,” he answered, pointing to the copy he had just autographed for me of Brightness Falls. I wondered at the time if this was the type of thing many writers would say, in pride over giving birth at all to their latest piece of fiction after so much intense labor, amid so much self-doubt and after challenging themselves with a new ambition, no matter how well or badly executed.

But all these years later, McInerney continues to believe, as he notes on his Web site, that it is “my favorite of all the novels.” I’m not sure if I agree with him, but I understand perfectly why he feels this way. 

Brightness Falls is not so wildly daring as Bright Lights, but it paints a far bigger social canvas—New York on the brink of the Wall Street Crash of ’87—and to be able to maintain control over such sprawling material is not as easy as it looks. It may not be quite the Balzacian picture of its time that McInerney hoped to achieve (that honor still goes to Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities), but it is certainly accomplished.

I have another reason to like Brightness Falls: its echoes of my favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. McInerney’s two chief characters, husband and wife Russell and Corrine Calloway, are the envy of their social circle, in much the same way that Dick and Nicole Diver are in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Both novels deal with how an American couple chooses to live amid their country’s giddy economic spree. Both books are ironic, at points brutal summaries of capitalism (Corrine makes her living as a stockbroker, while Russell gets caught up in a leverage-buyout scheme against the company where he works as an editor).

While Fitzgerald delineates the dissolution of a marriage, McInerney chronicles one in which the union, while surviving, has been shaken to the core. (Indeed, in a later book, The Good Life—written after 9/11, McInerney’s divorce from his third wife and a bout of writer’s block—readers find out just how perilous the state of their marriage is.)

Both novels are also, inescapably, about loss. That sense is expressed most vividly, in Tender is the Night, when Dick Diver tells his group of friends that the French battlefield they are visiting represents the disintegration of an entire civilization. Brightness Falls climaxes in a death that is part of  a similar turning point for those caught up in it: the AIDS crisis. The vision of loss in today’s “Bonus Quote of the Day” begins with that generational loss, then widens out to the eternal problem of aging, ailing and dying parents, the “dark threshold” that haunted the protagonist of Brightness Lights, Big City as well.

It took a while for the excellence of Tender Is the Night to be appreciated.  I hope that Brightness Falls will find similar levels of appreciation now that time has removed us further from the events that gave rise to it.

(Photograph of Jay McInerney taken on April 21, 2010, by David Shankbone.)

Flashback, November 1917: Fitzgerald and The Great General)

It was a scenario that only a Hollywood screenwriter—including a down-on-his-luck novelist hoping to regenerate his life out there—could have conceived: the future author of The Great American Novel meets a future American war hero and President. F. Scott Fitzgerald, with dreams of (primarily non-military) glory in his head, reported for duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in November 1917. His commanding officer, fresh out of West Point, was equally eager to make his mark over in the Great War in Europe, and would be equally disappointed not to get there: Dwight D. Eisenhower (pictured here, with wife Mamie, only a year before). What the experience taught the two men, was, oddly enough, openness to whatever fate had in store for them—in the event, quite a lot.

Two men to become famous in the future, thrown together by fate: To our knowledge, they never actually exchanged greetings. That would seem like the kind of thing that could only happen in the world of alternative history. But that’s never stopped Hollywood before in fashioning events from what didn't happen, and I doubt if it would be an obstacle now if someone decided to make a film about them.

Before learning about this, the only real-life military figure I ever associated with Fitzgerald was his brother-in-law Clifton "Ziggy" Sprague, a WWII admiral who became a hero at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (by which time the novelist was dead). (I don’t count Fitzgerald’s frenemy Ernest Hemingway, who got his war wound not as an officer or enlisted man but as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, on an errand to hand out chocolate and cigarettes to other soldiers. When he got home, the young man was soon exaggerating his real exploits—carrying another wounded man to safety, despite his own injury—into a whole lot more for the benefit of hometown audiences.)

But Ike was bigger than Hemingway, or Sprague, or nearly anyone you could name from either war. Let’s explore what Fitzgerald and Eisenhower were like at the time, and how the seeds of what they became are prefigured here.

On the one hand, we have Fitzgerald, his Princeton education shortened by academic lassitude. Only the month before reporting to Fort Leavenworth, he had received a commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry. He was not fighting as part of a rush to defend his country, nor as part of a Wilsonian crusade for a wider world of peace, justice and security. At first, that might make one think that he was fighting the war without any sense of the romantic. But that is the last thing one could say. No, he had applied for officer training because he thought it would provide material for his fiction. In other words, he was a romantic youth craving a great adventure.

What kind of a person would fight in a war for that motive? The answer might be found in the title of the apprentice novel on which Fitzgerald would be working throughout his training: The Romantic Egotist, later to be turned into This Side of Paradise, the 1920 novel that made him the inadvertent spokesman for the Jazz Age. "I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight," he later wrote. "Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself."

Adding to his self-absorption, Fitzgerald was absolutely convinced he would die in combat. That might have been true, but he might have improved his chances—as well as those of the men who would be under his command—had he been paying more attention in class. Instead, he worked on his Ivy League bildungsroman, concealed in a copy of Small Problems for Infantry, according to Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower: In War and Peace.

Did Captain Eisenhower have any idea of the inattentive lieutenant under his command? It’s doubtful that Fitzgerald confided his literary ambition to the recent West Pointer. Still, it’s a safe bet that Eisenhower, had he ever been moved to put pen to paper about Fitzgerald, would not have been enthused. If Edward M. Coffman’ s 1968 history, The War to End All Wars, is to be believed, Fitzgerald even nodded off to sleep during at least one of Eisenhower’s lectures.

Eisenhower might not have been able to tell Fitzgerald much about the latter’s growing preoccupation—class—nor would he have displayed the worldly sophistication demonstrated by Father Sigourney Fay,  his headmaster at Newman Prep in New Jersey. But the captain was doing his level best to teach the art of survival.

Instead, the budding novelist made the same kind of mistake that other Ivy League intellectuals were disposed to make about Eisenhower, even (perhaps one should make that especially) decades later: He underestimated him, badly. As one Columbia group of educators found out years later, Ike, when given the opportunity to lecture about military history, gave a crisp overview of the subject, not only displaying a thorough grounding in the subject but dispensing totally with the circumlocutions (more often than not, intentional) that baffled (and, in turn, were lampooned by) reporters during his Presidency.

I like to think that somehow, if fate had thrown them together where they could have spoken, as one human to another (rather than Ike, inquiring why Fitzgerald had caught 40 winks in his class), they might have established a solid bond of shared characteristics:

·        *  Love of football. At 5 ft. 7 in., 138 pounds, Fitzgerald was not much of a physical specimen, but he tried out anyway for the Princeton football team. As I wrote in a prior post, he was especially fascinated by a Princeton student of his time who was a legend on the gridiron, Hobey Baker. Eisenhower later admitted that it was hard to overstate his passion for athletics when he got to West Point. Though he bulked himself up enough to play on the varsity squad as a linebacker and running back, his gridiron glory ended abruptly when he injured his knee.

·         * Self-discipline and ambition. It might be hard to think of an alcoholic as self-disciplined, but even as his disease increasingly got the better of him, Fitzgerald continued to produce work. His professionalism was all the more necessary in the 1930s, as he sought to pay for his wife’s medical bills and his daughter’s education. And as a young man, he was simply burning to make his way in the literary world. Eisenhower hid his ambition under a sunny smile. As his son John later remarked: “Dad could get over any disappointment easily, as long as he won.”

·         * Smoking. Fitzgerald’s mistress, Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, never saw him take another drink after January 1940, but he couldn’t shed his addiction to cigarettes, and the continuing damage from that (as well as the residual damage from drinking) led to his death later that year. Eisenhower’s smoking, which began at West Point, got his relationship with Bernard Montgomery off on the wrong foot, as the British commander starchily informed him in front of an entire group that he did not allow smoking in his presence. Eisenhower’s two heart attacks as President resulted from years of heavy use.

·        *  Study of  “theatrics.” At an early age, Fitzgerald was drawn to amateur theatricals, and at college he wrote scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals. He was enthralled from early on by the power of the new medium, film, and spent several years toward the end of his life in Hollywood. From youth to adulthood, Eisenhower raced through western novels, the first, most dramatic genre of cinema. He was associated throughout much of the 1930s with a prima donna, perhaps the greatest actor of the first half of the 20^th century. No, not Barrymore or Tracy or Olivier, but General Douglas MacArthur. That was the source of Ike’s wisecrack that he had “studied theatrics under MacArthur.”

·         * Love of country. Eisenhower’s love of country was expressed not just in words that were obvious (“Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America”) but in ones not so much (“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. “). If he had had the chance to look at a piece of paper with the full name of the slight young soldier under his command—Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald—I’m sure he might have elicited a friendly conversation that would have resulted in the revelation that the composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was an ancestor. Later on, the young man’s most dazzling novel would feature a character marked by an “extraordinary gift for hope” that characterized his country, and that novel would end with an evocation of  “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world.”

Fitzgerald would have been surprised to hear that the commander with the outwardly friendly smile but steel-trap intelligence delivering lectures at Fort Leavenworth was as bored and frustrated by the process as he was. The only way Ike could abide being away from his wife and baby would have been fighting in Europe, where he could have distinguished himself in battle. Instead, he had not only been condemned to what he regarded as a backwater of the war by the Army, by virtue of his obvious talent for educating young men in drills, but reprimanded by deskbound bureaucrats for his repeated requests for transfers to the European front.

Eisenhower would have to be content, to the limited extent he could, with the thought that no experience goes utterly to waste. The same held true for Fitzgerald. Although he never got near the front (the war ended just before his unit embarked for Europe), it would be a mistake to say that WWI left no mark on him. (And I'm not thinking principally here of the fact that a later assignment to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Ala., was the occasion for him meeting a beautiful 18-year-old Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, who became his wife.)

In Nick Carraway’s opening meditation in The Great Gatsby, he notes that after he returned from the war, he had wanted the world to “be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” In Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender Is the Night, his protagonist, the expatriate psychiatrist Dick Diver, leads a small group on a trip to a battlefield in France. Though, like his creator, he did not experience combat, Diver knows all too well the cost of what happened here: “See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.”

(The photo of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower was taken on the front steps of St. Louis Hall, St. Mary's University, San Antonio, Texas, in 1916. The source of the image is the Eisenhower Library.)