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

responding for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. (309)
    Given that everyone involved has been party to the murder of Peterson, Dick’s example is calculated. In effect, Nicole is told that her lover is dead, and that in order to retain her class position (perceived as a relationship with a mass audience) she must avoid response and pursue gesture. Significantly, Dick casts himself as the ‘murdered Chinese’: his choice of figure is complex, perhaps involving an ironic reflection on his status as disposable servant; it also makes cryptic allusion to his own ethnically stained emissions, while, for Rosemary, hinting that what went on in Parisian and Roman hotel rooms was little more than the hiring and firing of a foreign body. These layers remain peripheral to the main direction of his lesson which, as the culmination of his language of fabrication, reflects his conviction that the social arena has become a stage where audience demand is paramount. In such circumstances, ‘charm’ and ‘grace’ give way to mere lying, as the mass market requires of its market leaders only that they surprise and so, through provision of the ‘new’, continue to lead. Nicole obeys instructions: she turns directly to Barban and to brand name, going ‘all
out
of character’ in order to retain the characteristics of a changing class. She leaves the beach feeling ‘new and happy’ (310), and ‘knowing vaguely that Dick had planned for her to have [her freedom]’ (311), she writes a letter propositioning her next husband.
    Book III charts Dick’s sustained performance of decline, during which he declares himself no longer effective; no longer a centre, an author or indeed a responsible agent of action. All is lethargy, parody and scorn: witness the sustained metaphors of vampirism, Dick’s bouts of interior laughter (337) and his final act – ‘with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace’ (337). Dick abdicates comprehensively from what he has made, from his familial and professional tasks and, more disturbingly, from what he has been made – a ‘whole-souled’ (67), integral being.
    Nor can he be put together again. Poised above contrary movements within the capital which provides his foundation, he quits the sites which his adoptive class prefers. In no particular order, and virtually all at once, he deserts the psychiatric armchair, the surrogate drawing-rooms, the phallus and even (projecting) the sound-stage. Dick’s dive is complete and outdistances the critics. Perhaps ‘the old interior laughter’ prompted the selection of an aquaplane from which to parody his surname. To push the pun (maybe no further than Fitzgerald intended) Dick does not resurface: without fixed abode or declared destination, his movements after his return to America are quite literally mapped by Nicole, but they are not understood. Symptomatically, he rejects her offer of money and no longer ‘ask[s] for the children to be sent’ (338), capital and the family being two of the mediations through which he made himself what he was and has chosen no longer to be.
    The problem remains: if Dick decides to quit, and money, alcohol, general dissolution or Fitzgerald’s autobiography cannot in any emphatic sense be ‘blamed’, why does he quit? At no point in the novel is his decision directly addressed, an omission that should not produce charges of slack construction or inadequate characterization. The question raises the broader issue of Fitzgerald’s narrative technique. Cause passes from persons into objects viewed as metaphors or, more properly, as plot miniatures and encapsulated narratives. Fitzgerald’s nine-year struggle with the construction of
Tender is the Night
reflects his fear