In the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, charm is as dangerous as it is advantageous. Anthony Patch's wit and urbanity in The Beautiful and Damned allows him more respect and material possessions than any profession would, but ultimately leads him to insanity and murder. Jay Gatsby's glamour and extravagant lifestyle is the envy of his generation, but leaves him nothing but a rainy funeral attended by few. Dick Diver, the protagonist of Tender Is the Night, is so cursed by his charm and charisma that he is compelled to marry the psychiatric patient who has fallen in love with him, has no choice but to carry on a romantic affair with the beautiful young movie actress who has offered her virginity, and takes up heavy drinking in order to maintain the veneer of control everyone else believes is unwavering.
Just as your average Fitzgerald character is saddled with nearly unlimited (though never without a catch) and undeserved money, he is also gifted with a likeable, trustful, seductive persona on which men of a weaker nature feed, and which stronger men admire. That is, until the very end, when all the money has been spent, and the qualities that got him so far in love, in culture, in experience, prove to be hollow and useless.
Dick Diver is cut more from the Anthony Patch cloth than from Gatsby's. Both are intelligent men who coast on looks and the gift of gab. Both love their mercurial wives, though aren't above a little side action when the atmosphere is sufficiently lovey-dovey. And both are fundamentally lazy in their pursuits and their ethics, either because of a cultivated indolence via a wealthy patron (Patch) or through the long spoiling by a rich wife whose primary expression of love is the giving of lavish gifts (Diver). Gatsby, unlike these people, wanted something, and Gatsby worked for it. Patch and Diver are perhaps more damaged for wanting nothing. Life inevitably becomes excruciating for them, one daft episode after the other in a perpetual attempt to escape boredom.
The plot of Tender Is the Night is fairly straightforward, though two different versions of the novel have been released since its initial publication. In one version, the story is told chronologically; in the other, the chronology is altered to the service of dramatic tension (the version Fitzgerald originally released, changed presumably because of timeline confusion in some readers). Richard Diver, psychiatrist on the make, works in an European sanitarium, tending to the rich afflicted. One of his patients is the lovely but withdrawn Nicole Warren, traumatized at a young age by her widower father. The handsome physician proves too magnetic, too effective for Nicole and the sanitarium staff not to notice--to extricate himself from the situation and the ethical concerns involved, Diver leaves for a tour of Europe alone. As coincidence would have it, the traveling Diver encounters Nicole at a mountain hotel, and after a few heated exchanges the couple consummate their mutual love. Nicole's sister Baby supplies the splendid idea that Dick will not only be Nicole's husband, but also her full-time, lifelong shrink.
The Divers take up permanent residence in Europe (possibly to be as far from Nicole's father as they can), their expenses paid for with money from Nicole's guilt-stricken patriarch in the United States. Though he is perpetually engaged with a psychological treatise, Dick is disinclined to practice psychiatric medicine, partly because there is little need for him to work, but mostly because he has a constantly unstable challenge in his wife. Dick, Nicole and their children spend their summers at the French Riviera, which they themselves have popularized to both artists and oddballs. An assortment of displaced intellectuals, drunken, failed jazz musicians, soldiers and undiscovered authors are caught in the Divers' gravitational pull: the inferior writer McKisco and his high-strung wife; the majestic Abe North, a musician who doesn't play music; Tommy Barban, the mercenary without a home country, and Campion, effeminate and treated with little respect in the few pages that portray him. Last among this group is Rosemary Speers, on vacation with her mother, of a first generation of talking movie stars. Naturally, she falls in love with Dick Diver. Diver falls in love with her, too, though he doesn't act on the impulse right away. His hands are mostly full with Nicole, who has a full-fledged breakdown in the bathroom during one of the Divers' parties.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald, what usually follows love is extreme disappointment ("Winter Dreams") or a grinding, co-dependent irrationality that is the undoing of its main characters (The Beautiful and Damned). In Tender Is the Night, love leads to both. Dick Diver knows that the fresh and successful Rosemary is lost to him as he ages and begins to drink more, and she grows beyond him. As for his relationship with Nicole, it is perhaps best symbolized by her manic attempt to crash their moving car and murder her whole family. She too grows beyond Dick, and at the end of the novel she begins a love affair with the physically deteriorated but still vibrant Tommy Barban. By then, Dick is scandalized as a psychiatrist, his career in Europe over. He is too tired to mourn the loss of his wife, his entire life. Ultimately he takes up residence back in the United States, where he practices psychiatry where no one knows him and he behaves inappropriately and moves on and practices and moves on until he disappears.
If there is one recurring motif in Tender Is the Night, it is deflation. To rehash a cliche, things end not with a bang but a whimper. During a climactic duel in the first part of the book, both duellists miss. When his friend Abe North is murdered outside a club, Dick only learns of it secondhand and after the fact. With Rosemary, there are no recriminations, no confrontation, no shouting--just resignation, the infatuation having run its course. The murder of a man is covered up and never mentioned again. And when Tommy Barban makes demands on Nicole, Dick Diver lets her go. In this novel, the only thing to be learned from defeat is that giving up will save you the trouble.
What keeps Tender Is the Night from utter bleakness is the vitality of its writing. Fitzgerald claimed he had to use stimulants during the process of completing the novel, and some of that is evident here, in quick moving juicy episodes interspersed with languid, reflective scenes. There are the descriptions of which Fitzgerald is master--descriptions of geography, descriptions of being drunk, descriptions of how the whole world feels to a body that has been kissed for the first time. But it's not just aesthetics that keep one reading. There is plenty of the meaty, sensational stuff: murdered strangers collapsed on hotel beds, Italian cops beating the stuffing out of drunk tourists, mental patients, the total losing of one's shit, gun play, sex in all of its manifestations, the paying off of public officials. Unfortunately, the night is not so tender for everybody.
