Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

application.
    The degree of Dick’s self-knowledge belies the critical consensus which deprives him of an active place in his own fall. The very vocabulary of decline charges an external force with responsibility: critics generally name alcohol, money or authorial autobiography as the prime suspects. However, Dick’s knowledge of his own position within a sexual and economic trauma makes the term ‘failure’ a critical whitewash. Dick neither declines nor falls – he jumps or, more specifically, takes a dive. His repeated failure to raise a man on his shoulders while riding an aquaplane can be taken as an expression of middle-aged vanity or as the nostalgia of a dissolute athlete; however, such readings ignore the pervasive vocabulary of theatre running through the incident. Arguably, Dick’s manner of parting company with the Baby Gar is the last act in his release from and of Nicole. Immediately after the event, on the beach with Rosemary and Nicole, Dick discusses acting in what is effectively a gloss on his own recent performance. He promotes a style of ‘burl
es
que’ arising from the actor’s compulsive need to retain audience attention, arguing that, since the audience can ‘do the “responding” for themselves’, the duty of the performer is to ‘do something unexpected’: ‘If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all
out
of character—you understand?’ (309–10; italicsin source). Dick outlines his own method on the board. He too went ‘all
out
of character’. Where the audience thinks him adroit (hard), he is inept (soft). Where the audience hopes for direction, he mismanages. A performance of decline is undertaken at some distance from the facts of decline – almost in the style of one of Brecht’s Chinese actors:
    The performer portrays incidents of utmost passion, but without his delivery becoming heated. At those points where the character portrayed is deeply excited the performer takes a lock of hair between his lips and chews it. But this is like a ritual, there is nothing eruptive about it. It is quite clearly somebody else’s repetition of the incident: a representation. (Brecht, ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ 93)
    Dick’s ‘alienation effect’ entails the representation of dissolution so that Nicole may be released to the new forms of money. Earlier, and with intimations of another dive, it had involved a tacit mutual suicide from the deck of Golding’s yacht:
    his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.
    â€˜You ruined me, did you?’ he inquired blandly. ‘Then we’re both ruined. So——’
    Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him—again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation—all right, then——
    â€”But now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing: ‘Tch! tch!’ (294)
    Dick ‘portrays’ the suicide pact, delivering this trope from the genre of romance with the detachment of a chess player, and terminating his exposition on two brief expulsions of breath, which caption both the scene and Nicole’s absorption in it as childish nonsense. Barban approaches and Dick demonstrates the appropriateness of Nicole’s new partner with the pointed question, ‘Are you rich, Tommy?’ (295).
    To return, briefly, to Dick’s beach workshop on theatre technique – although addressing Rosemary, he simultaneously talks to Nicole:
    let’s suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to entertain—the audience can do the