Earlier this year, I wrote a post recommending Hemingway—his short story, The short & happy life of Francis Macomber. The interest of the story is this: Although it’s a hunting story in darkest Africa, it’s about American women taking over America. This is also the interest of Fitzgerald’s last completed novel. Tender is the night is also his best work. It’s still a story about very rich Americans, but it is more interesting than the others, because it is set in Europe, after the Great War. After reading it, I came to suspect that Fitzgerald understood some things about the French & Germans, about the English, too, which few people understand. I wondered whether he did not waste some of his talent in writing about American women when there were grand subjects—but then again, Americans have never paid for novelists to tell them why the French are as they are…
Dick Diver & his wife Nicole are the protagonists of the story, although it takes a bit of time to get to know them. They are not so easy to know because they are glamorous—they are introduced in relation to the admiration & envy & desire of lesser Americans to make their acquaintance. The Divers are Americans in Cannes, before Cannes was a famous resort, before Americans were everywhere & forever in France, but at the time when the French rather desperately needed American money, wooed tourists every which way accordingly, & despised themselves for it. This was the Roaring Twenties, a time when, Fitzgerald as narrator says, Americans wanted only one thing, to be entertained. The Divers are the highest entertainment Americans can understand. They are young, strong, beautiful, wealthy beyond words & inexplicably elegant. They are at home in Europe while retaining their American origins—an open manner, friendliness, confidence… Democracy at its best—democracy with luxuries…
Fitzgerald’s introduction also does not make clear the structure of the novel. It’s in three parts, the central one focuses on Dick, the last on Nicole, the first on Rosemary—a young American celebrity, a middle class girl groomed for the stage who has suddenly become a Hollywood star & who nevertheless is amazed by this glamorous couple. Most of the novel is set in Cannes & environs, but a good part is set in Switzerland; it also stretches in time back to the Great War & forward into the misery of the ‘30s. It is an unhappy story, it seems very moralistic: We are attracted to glamour, we wish to invade the privacy of the beautiful, & literature only succeeds if it can gives us the illusion of such a success, something like possessing a beautiful young woman—yet the consequence is unending misery. Not tragedy; but the unhappiness of a failed love that makes life unbearable—humiliation & exhaustion, self-contempt. Beauty turned to ugliness, without any obvious profit… It is written well, with a modesty American writers have lost; & it is very intelligent; as with most of the better novelists, Fitzgerald was prescient & is therefore a good educator for intelligent people who now notice all around them the things that were so unusual they could make for scandalous novels.
I won’t pretend to explain to you why men & women are so unhappy with one another. But the major event of the 20th c. in America was the emancipation of the women—we owe everything we see today to that fact. Few saw it or could speak intelligently about it. Fitzgerald is cleareyed; accordingly he speaks of women understanding themselves in relation to men & then the possibility of imitating men on the basis of modern principles.
In the scene where Dick Diver is humiliated, his manliness compromised, a woman comes to the rescue & this is how Fitzgerald interrupts her only remarkable action:
The American Woman, aroused, stood over him; the cleansweeping irrational temper that had broken the moral back of a race & made a nursery out of a continent, was too much for him.
I remind you, the nursery comment refers to Prohibition, the great moment of Progressive Feminism before the more famous feminism. Today, it seems Prohibition is considered trivial, so no one would think this way; it’s perhaps still used by libertarians as a smug comment about how prohibition doesn’t work. Fitzgerald would tell such libertarians that they wish for lawlessness, & have got it without realizing it. Far from considering them realistic or cynical, he’d call them deluded idealists, though it is not easy to explain how one can make ugliness into an ideal. One aspect of the rule of women is incessant moralism. Hence, the nursery—not the replacement of alcohol, which tests men’s courage, with milk, but the suggestion that women as mothers now have run of the country, there is less & less room for men, who are being infantilized. I guess the major male characters would be called misogynists today, but Fitzgerald presents them as weaker than their women, nor free of them.
The other aspect of this new gynaikocracy is a somewhat childish immorality, a kind of selfishness remarkable for being petty. In the last part of the novel, Fitzgerald begins to explain the thoughts of a woman looking for a divorce:
His assertion seemed to absolve her from all blame or responsibility & she had a thrill of delight in thinking of herself in a new way. New vistas appeared ahead, peopled with the faces of many men, none of whom she need obey or even love. She drew in her breath, hunched her shoulders with a wriggle...
A final quote regarding the matter:
Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money & her faith that her sister disliked him & was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-ing & dine-ing slowness, her health & beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities—for this inner battle she used even her weaknesses— fighting bravely & courageously with the old cans & crockery & bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. & suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory & justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever.