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 (Ingrid Rowland, on Raphael, ‘Artistic Entrepreneur’ of the Italian Renaissance)

“As the mature man's skill and sophistication are gradually stripped away, we realize how remarkable his [Raphael’s] career really was, and how utterly unlikely: how many factors, how much hard work and ruthless self-criticism, combined to transform a promising young painter into an artistic entrepreneur of a kind that Italy had never seen before: painter; architect; designer of jewelry, sculpture, and graphics; pioneer of historical preservation; artistic theorist.”—Univ. of Notre Dame professor of architecture and history Ingrid Rowland, “The Virtuoso,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 20, 2020

I never got around back on April 6 to take note of the 500^th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael. Unlike contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, he never had the chance to live to late middle age or even old age, having passed away on his 37^th birthday.

Maybe it’s better that I didn’t write about it then, because I might have felt less inclined to consider Ms. Rowland’s appreciation of Raphael’s legacy in The New York Review of Books. She hails not only his “natural facility” as a painter (“on a par with Mozart’s in music and Michelangelo’s in stone”) but also the way he interacted with—and, in turn, influenced—Rome in this “veritable age of entrepreneurs, every one of them giddy with the excitement of intercontinental exchange.”

It is curious that Rowland—using her review of this year’s Raphael exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale—does not tie the painter’s temperament to his ability to attract such a large spectrum of work and patrons.

To the extent that this is possible, I turned to Giorgio Vasari’s short biography of him in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (2nd edn, 1568), which relates how Raphael created a ton of admirers among his fellow painters through his aura of amiability:

“[T]hey were overcome both by his courtesy and by his art, and even more by the good disposition of his nature, which was so full of gentleness and so overflowing with loving kindness, that it was seen that the very animals, not to speak of men, honored him. It is said that if any painter who knew him, and even any who did not know him, asked him for some drawing that he needed, Raffaello would leave his own work in order to assist him. And he always kept a vast number of them employed, aiding them and teaching them with such a love as might have been the due rather of his own children than of fellow craftsmen; for which reason he was never seen to go to Court without having with him, as he left his house, some fifty painters, all able and excellent, who kept him company in order to do him honor. In short, he lived not like a painter, but like a prince.”

All of this stood in sharp contrast to most craftsmen of the time, Vasari insisted, who were afflicted with “a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendor of those virtues that make men immortal.”

Rowland’s discussion of Rome as an entrepreneurial beehive of the Renaissance has made me want to pick up again a book I laid aside for lack of time: Niccolo Rising, the first installment in Dorothy Dunnett’s sprawling sequence of eight historical novels, The House of Niccolo. Not just a novelist but also an accomplished portrait painter, constant traveler and active philanthropist, she would have been in a unique position to explain to readers how so many influences combined to create the likes of Raphael.

(The image accompanying this post is a self-portrait of the artist from the Art Archive/Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Alfredo Dagli Orti.) 

This Day in Ancient History (Julius Caesar Assassinated)

March 15, 44 B.C.—Falling at the foot of the statue of Pompey, the son-in-law and fellow consul he had defeated, Julius Caesar was assassinated, as Roman Senators perpetrated what turned out to be a vain attempt to save the republic.

The death of Caesar has been told countless times over the centuries—through gossipy ancient histories (Suetonius), drama (William Shakespeare), and novels (Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March). One of the more interesting recent attempts was in the HBO miniseries Rome.

The actor playing Caesar, Ciaran Hinds, was easily the most mesmerizing figure in the show. In fact, if you have never seen Season 1, I’d advise you to skip all the stuff about Caesar's two soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo (they are mentioned in his Commentaries, but that’s about it), and concentrate on this shrewd master of men.

At first, Caesar hardly seems the stuff of which dictators are made. Though he will act to protect his interests, he is not needlessly brutal, and in fact is ready to forgive those who have risen up against him, figuring this will manage to win him friends rather than enemies. 

(How well this theory worked out with his protégé and the man who was almost a son to him, Marcus Brutus, is too well known to bear repeating.) 

The important factor, though, was that he could be humorous and kindly only as it suited his purpose: to bind men to him. Otherwise, it was near-impossible to guess at the impulses behind his mask of command.

Perhaps it had something to do with the kind of love of crowds and performing to which actors can relate, but in time, Rome demonstrated, Caesar became increasingly intoxicated by power. Particularly after his anointing as emperor, he came to view himself as possessed of almost divine powers.

Except for the presence (or, I should say, the diversion) of loyal soldier and bodyguard Vorenus, the show’s depiction of the assassination follows fairly closely the account by Nicolaus of Damascus, who was not there himself but interviewed several of the principals within a few years of the event. 

I found fascinating how the conspirators finally settled on assassinating Caesar right in the Senate (the rejected possibilities include murdering him along his favorite walk, the Sacred Way; on a bridge he had to cross to appoint magistrates for elections; and at a gladiatorial show).

(The image accompanying this post comes from the acclaimed 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with Louis Calhern as the unsuspecting victim and Edmond O'Brien as Casca, the conspirator who struck the first blow.)