Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gordon Bryant, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(February March 25) OK, so Scott was a beeeelyun times the writer Zelda ever was.

This is a beautifully told story, and I was particularly struck by the contrast between how modern Fitzgerald sounds and how long ago 1925 was... Dick Diver sounds like someone you'd meet at a contemporary party, whereas the world of Tender Is the Night is a strange alternate universe where you become an outcast if you're ever caught drunk in public.

I say Fitzgerald sounds modern, as though to imply that his contemporaries didn't; but of course Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, etc., sound modern, too -- although I'd say they sound self-consciously modern, which Fitzgerald doesn't to me. He doesn't seem to be worried about creating new forms for the novel; he seems to be wanting to give you the novel version of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," with his own life as the lab specimen.

In conclusion: Fitzgerald was a beautiful writer. His descriptions are breathtaking. There is also something almost Shakespearean about him in his ability to sketch a whole scene and its mood in only a few words: "Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war"... "A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day" ...and to capture those odd perceptions we all have but don't have names for: "Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

Also, if I'm comparing the treatment of the dissolution of the Fitzgeralds' marriage here and in Save Me the Waltz, then I have to say that Scott's version is far nobler, kinder... and sadder.