Content area
Full Text
It is a commonplace of Scott Fitzgerald criticism that Tender Is the Night (1934, rev. 1951) embodies its author's most comprehensive account of a certain kind of fate--a fate all but mythologized by Fitzgerald himself in the course of his lifelong meditation on the meaning of America: that of the genteel American idealist who strives to create illusions of invulnerable beauty and munificence, only to fall prey to the triple temptation of money, sex, and glamor which informs Fitzgerald's unique version of the modern wasteland.(1) So conceived, the story of Dick Diver's long descent (or "dying fall," as Fitzgerald described it [Letters 310]) from his initial eminence into ultimate obscurity repeats a pattern of disillusion and decline already firmly in place by the time Fitzgerald began writing Tender in 1925. The pattern is most immediately apparent, of course, in The Great Gatsby, published that same year, whose dashing hero enacts in his material obsessions and seamy downfall an almost legendary destiny in American literature, one that illuminates the otherwise unequal fates of Clyde Griffiths, Thomas Sutpen, Willy Loman, and even Humbert Humbert.(2) But the pattern is also prevalent in such other narratives of the twenties as The Beautiful and Damned, "May Day," "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and "The Rich Boy"--works in which, as Bruce Grenberg suggests, Fitzgerald "depicts an America whose ideals, noble in themselves, are becoming untenable, whose idealists, by the very nature of their ideals, are being corrupted, or crushed and cast out by a new culture progressively giving itself over to material, amoral pleasure" (217).
In this predominantly tragic view of the novel, the story of Dick Diver's uneasy marriage to Nicole Warren and of his humiliating attachment to her family's fortune is not merely the story of one man's failure to resist the corrupting influences of wealth and privilege; by allegorical extension it is also, as Nick Carraway once said of Gatsby, the story of America itself, or at least that portion of its history--postwar, urban, and early modern--which Fitzgerald repeatedly portrayed as the period inaugurating America's moral decline as well as its eventual emergence as a major military and economic power.(3) Insofar as Tender Is the Night exposes its hero to the inherent contradictions and confusions of...