The seed of tragedy is sown upon one’s decision to be great. The declaration, so often made in youth, seems to correlate, if not causate, years of toil which crack at one’s resolution until, for many, it begins to recede entirely. Still, the urge for greatness is unsurprising. For when upon entry to adulthood the world opens itself up to you so entirely, greatness seems only a subtle stretch beyond mundanity. The decision to martyr oneself for something—anything—seems a noble pursuit.
Or so it remains for me in my naivete. It was in searching for a hill to die on that I began my inquiry into the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is one of the few writers who has become as famous as his prose. It is near impossible to read his work, even at a cursory level, without stumbling upon assumptions of autobiography—tragedy lined thick with truth. It is perhaps an over-reading, but my understanding nonetheless, that pushes me to consider Fitzgerald not an inventor but an archivist of lofty aspirations and the costs they inflict for those that undertake them.
Wanting answers, I did what any cheap hack would, and began at the end with Fitzgerald’s last novel, Tender is the Night. The novel follows the lives of Dick Diver, a psychologist, and his wife, Nicole, who battles increasingly with her mental health. Unlike many of Fitzgerald’s heroes, Dick is not a writer. He is, however—common and critical to Fitzgerald—brilliant, or once had the potential to be so.
The novel opens from the perspective of Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress who becomes immediately enamoured with the Divers. Sitting on the beach in the French Riviera, the Divers are young, rich, and beautiful. A compelling lot. The remaining cast of characters—and a cast it is, referred to time and again as an ensemble or gallery of playthings upon a stage—is blemished in one way or another. Too vulgar or loud, they do not share the opulence of the Divers. They are secondaries, subsidiaries to the story. The Divers rest atop this social pyramid. What is unbeknownst to the Divers, acting as young gods at the beginning of their reign, is that life has a way of eating through us and often, what seems like a path of ascension eventually levels off entirely.
The novel soon sees the Divers move to Switzerland in an attempt to remedy both Nicole’s failing health and Dick’s unsatisfactory progress on his research. It soon becomes evident, however, that the clinic they reside within is stifling. News of the death of Dick’s father provides an excuse for respite, allowing Dick to abandon his sick wife momentarily and revisit the old friends we’d been introduced to on the Riviera at the book’s opening. This holiday, however, does nothing to assuage Dick’s qualms but instead only shows him the degree of his life’s stagnation. Five years on he is faced with the success of all the subsidiary characters he had so wholly discarded upon meeting. His young love, Rosemary, has become a widely successful actress, Albert McKisco, a man he had written off as being talentless has become a well-received novelist, and Tommy Barban, a mercenary who was constantly parading his strength seems to have truly surpassed Dick in the pursuit of manhood.
Once termed ‘too much of a capital-investment’ to send off to fight in the Great War—too full of potential for early expiration—Dick is faced with the fact that he has decayed amidst life’s trials. As the novel continues, Dick’s research interests are in constant conversation, but remain hazy and unfocused. They begin to look more like the notion of attempting something rather than the attempt itself. It is a tragedy as commonplace as fruit rotting in a bowl on the kitchen table.
It is a tragedy Fitzgerald himself knew well. There is a nine year gap between the publications of Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby, and his fourth and final, Tender is the Night. Yet, the writer began penning his final novel mere months after the publication of The Great Gatsby. The extensive interlude was fuelled by his wife Zelda’s declining mental health which prompted Fitzgerald to pander to commercial interests, writing for the screen as well as ‘slick magazines’, and continually putting off a new novel. Tender is the Night was finally published at a point in Fitzgerald’s life where it seemed his best years had escaped him. His final attempt at achieving greatness, the novel The Last Tycoon, remained unfinished at the time of his death. One must question then if Fitzgerald ever satisfied his urge for greatness, or if he died under the assumption that the potential for greatness he had held in his youth, had remained just that: potential.
It becomes evident across Fitzgerald’s novels that it is near impossible to live up to the image one casts for oneself. The necessary time and energy once assumed would be used to leave one’s mark on the world, becomes repurposed instead to stay alive, a harder feat than it seems from the onset. Tender is the Night contemplates whether the sacrifices we make for our families can ever be reconciled with our own desires. It is at its core an exhibition of jaded talent and the reality of life’s challenges. The Divers’ marriage dissolves as the two begin to blame each other for lost years and bleeding wounds they cannot seem to staunch. Dick ends the novel angry at Nicole, but knowing nonetheless,
‘He had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted even more than that to be loved. So it had been.’