So, when most folk are asked to name a work by Fitzgerald, they will almost always name The Great Gatsby (1925). The novels This Side Of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful And The Damned (1922) and Tender Is The Night rarely get a look-in, although some folk, especially those who claim to be ‘passionate about literature’, might mention them as an afterthought.
In terms of output – as in quantity not quality – Fitzgerald’s short stories knock the novels into cocked hat. If asked to name one or two of the shorter works, the usual suspects appear. A Diamond As Big As The Ritz – which might also be regarded as a novella – certainly, and Bernice Bobs Her Hair and The Curious Case Of Benjamin
Button are other favourites. But there are a lot, lot more, and after featuring in magazines, his stories appeared in a total of eight collections, from 1920 until 1931.
Pertinently, many of the stories are memorable, but some were, in Fitzgerald’s own words, especially those produced towards the end of the 1920s when it was plain just how dire things were becoming financially, ‘rotten stuff’. Many were churned out to try to keep his head above water.
By the mid-1920s he was paid handsomely by the magazines which published his stories, notably The Saturday Evening Post, and at his height he was banking up to $4,000 a story, just over $70,000 one hundred years on.
But Fitzgerald always spent more than he earned – on booze, taking himself, his wife Zelda and their daughter to Europe and renting expensive apartments and villas, and generally living high on the hog. He was helped to keep afloat by loans from his Scribner’s editor Max Perkins and his agent Harold Ober, although in the mid-1930s ever-tolerant Ober cut the umbilical cord and that money supply dried up.
Fitzgerald’s first novel was patchy and like many first novels vaguely autobiographical. His second covered the same ground as his short stories and, though readable and entertaining, it was nothing to get excited about.
Then, of course, came The Great Gatsby, and that work did and does stand out in 20th-century English literature. Finally, after a prolonged and difficult eight-year gestation, Fitzgerald published Tender Is The Night (1934), which I shall also describe as patchy (and I flesh out my judgment below). So, in brief, so much for America’s ‘greatest works’. Perhaps it should be ‘greatest work’ because Tender Is The Night can’t be included.
There is also the unfinished novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon, which can’t in my view be ranked with the published work as it is incomplete, although those who have read what we have of the work were impressed and spoke of a ‘new maturity’ in Fitzgerald’s writing. I haven’t read any of it.
Flushed by the – comparative – success of Gatsby, both artistically and critically, although sales were slow to take off), Fitzgerald began work on his next novel within a year, but soon hit the buffers. He had been drinking steadily since he left college and was now drinking ever more, and Zelda’s mental state was breaking down and straining their marriage.
Pertinently, many of the stories are memorable, but some were, in Fitzgerald’s own words, especially those produced towards the end of the 1920s when it was plain just how dire things were becoming financially, ‘rotten stuff’. Many were churned out to try to keep his head above water.
By the mid-1920s he was paid handsomely by the magazines which published his stories, notably The Saturday Evening Post, and at his height he was banking up to $4,000 a story, just over $70,000 one hundred years on.
But Fitzgerald always spent more than he earned – on booze, taking himself, his wife Zelda and their daughter to Europe and renting expensive apartments and villas, and generally living high on the hog. He was helped to keep afloat by loans from his Scribner’s editor Max Perkins and his agent Harold Ober, although in the mid-1930s ever-tolerant Ober cut the umbilical cord and that money supply dried up.
Fitzgerald’s first novel was patchy and like many first novels vaguely autobiographical. His second covered the same ground as his short stories and, though readable and entertaining, it was nothing to get excited about.
Then, of course, came The Great Gatsby, and that work did and does stand out in 20th-century English literature. Finally, after a prolonged and difficult eight-year gestation, Fitzgerald published Tender Is The Night (1934), which I shall also describe as patchy (and I flesh out my judgment below). So, in brief, so much for America’s ‘greatest works’. Perhaps it should be ‘greatest work’ because Tender Is The Night can’t be included.
There is also the unfinished novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon, which can’t in my view be ranked with the published work as it is incomplete, although those who have read what we have of the work were impressed and spoke of a ‘new maturity’ in Fitzgerald’s writing. I haven’t read any of it.
Flushed by the – comparative – success of Gatsby, both artistically and critically, although sales were slow to take off), Fitzgerald began work on his next novel within a year, but soon hit the buffers. He had been drinking steadily since he left college and was now drinking ever more, and Zelda’s mental state was breaking down and straining their marriage.
This is when he began to produce the ‘rotten stuff’ to help to pay the bills. Finances became even more stretched when Zelda was committed to a mental institute for the first of several times, and work on the new novel was intermittent at best.
Matthew Bruccoli, one of Fitzgerald’s biographers who describes Tender Is The Night as ‘misunderstood’ and ‘underrated’, analysed the various drafts of the work now in the Princeton library and concluded that overall there were seventeen drafts and three versions of it.
Apparently, Fitzgerald eventually cannibalised those drafts into a definitive draft of his fourth novel and finally found the discipline to work on it seriously.
He had high hopes for it, and when it was published in 1934 to comparative indifference, he was disappointed and came to believe that the work’s chronological structure was at fault, so he then reworked the novel.
Tender Is The Night consists of three ‘books’ and in its first iteration Book Two is a flashback. This detail, Fitzgerald reasoned, must have confused readers, so he rejigged the sequence, though this second version was not published until sixteen years after Tender first appeared and nine years after he died in 1941.
I read the first version (and didn’t know there was another versions until after I had bought it), and I have to confess that of all the faults I found in the novel, it’s chronology is not one of them. Perhaps readers of ninety years ago might have been put off by it ‘a flashback’, but today’s (‘modern’) readers are accustomed to all kinds of wacky shenanigans and I doubt they are bothered.
Of all the faults I find with Tender, the possibly confusing chronology, is not one of them. For me there are far worse faults which – I must again stress ‘in my view’ and that qualification is also pertinent – relegate the novel to something along the lines of ‘nice try this time, Scott, but no cigar’.
Fitzgerald, I am led to believe, thought lyricism as important in prose as in verse, perhaps unsurprisingly for man who was essentially Irish (and that is my preference, too). And his delight in the sound of words, the rhythm and melody of a sentence as much as his gift for succinct expression have him down as a great writer.
Matthew Bruccoli, one of Fitzgerald’s biographers who describes Tender Is The Night as ‘misunderstood’ and ‘underrated’, analysed the various drafts of the work now in the Princeton library and concluded that overall there were seventeen drafts and three versions of it.
Apparently, Fitzgerald eventually cannibalised those drafts into a definitive draft of his fourth novel and finally found the discipline to work on it seriously.
He had high hopes for it, and when it was published in 1934 to comparative indifference, he was disappointed and came to believe that the work’s chronological structure was at fault, so he then reworked the novel.
Tender Is The Night consists of three ‘books’ and in its first iteration Book Two is a flashback. This detail, Fitzgerald reasoned, must have confused readers, so he rejigged the sequence, though this second version was not published until sixteen years after Tender first appeared and nine years after he died in 1941.
I read the first version (and didn’t know there was another versions until after I had bought it), and I have to confess that of all the faults I found in the novel, it’s chronology is not one of them. Perhaps readers of ninety years ago might have been put off by it ‘a flashback’, but today’s (‘modern’) readers are accustomed to all kinds of wacky shenanigans and I doubt they are bothered.
Of all the faults I find with Tender, the possibly confusing chronology, is not one of them. For me there are far worse faults which – I must again stress ‘in my view’ and that qualification is also pertinent – relegate the novel to something along the lines of ‘nice try this time, Scott, but no cigar’.
Fitzgerald, I am led to believe, thought lyricism as important in prose as in verse, perhaps unsurprisingly for man who was essentially Irish (and that is my preference, too). And his delight in the sound of words, the rhythm and melody of a sentence as much as his gift for succinct expression have him down as a great writer.
Sadly, although the delight in the sound of words, the rhythm and melody of a sentence are present in Book One, they are overwhelmed in crowded, often rambling, sentences and rarely get a chance to breath. You can catch them sometimes if you re-read a sentence several times, but certainly not always.
As for the succinct, elegant expression of a thought or observation which marked his short stories, that, too, eludes Fitzgerald who, in Book One, seems to work on the principle of ‘why use one word when ten will do’. All this leads to a rather indigestible stodge. Even his delight in words is somehow overwrought and unnatural.
Here’s an example: in Book One Fitzgerald uses the two words autochthonous and glaucous. I was unfamiliar with both and I looked them up – I come across a word new to me several times month and always look them up.
In context both words ‘make sense’, but I couldn’t and can’t rid myself of the suspicion that Fitzgerald, with more than one eye on gaining his literary spurs as a ‘serious writer’, is showing off more than a little. Much of Book One echoes that self-conscious use of language and it becomes more obvious with the reading of Books Two and Three which notably drop that approach.
As for the succinct, elegant expression of a thought or observation which marked his short stories, that, too, eludes Fitzgerald who, in Book One, seems to work on the principle of ‘why use one word when ten will do’. All this leads to a rather indigestible stodge. Even his delight in words is somehow overwrought and unnatural.
Here’s an example: in Book One Fitzgerald uses the two words autochthonous and glaucous. I was unfamiliar with both and I looked them up – I come across a word new to me several times month and always look them up.
In context both words ‘make sense’, but I couldn’t and can’t rid myself of the suspicion that Fitzgerald, with more than one eye on gaining his literary spurs as a ‘serious writer’, is showing off more than a little. Much of Book One echoes that self-conscious use of language and it becomes more obvious with the reading of Books Two and Three which notably drop that approach.
Rather too often it occurred to me that in Tender, at least in Book One, Fitzgerald consciously set out to create ‘fine writing’ and ‘literature’, but simply the self-conscious effort of it all dooms that attempt to failure.
In sum, the harsh accusation of being pretentious, unfortunately, would seem to be apt to describe Scott’s attitude when composing Book One, and given the early, sharp and often satirical tone of his earlier stories, that is quite damning.
I have come across confessions from several readers that early on when starting Tender, they couldn’t take any more and decided the novel just wasn’t worth the candle. I know what they mean, but I did carry on and discovered that stylistically Book Two and to a certain extend Book Three have little in common with Book One. ‘Patchy’? Yes, you could say that.
One gibe to describe a work is to call it ‘novelese’, and it is not a kind observation; but it certainly would, again in my view – I must tread carefully – describe Book One. One clear symptom that a work is suffering from a bad case of ‘novelese’ is that the characters in a novel invariably speak as though they are characters in a novel.
They also develop, each of them, an uncanny ability to analyse themselves (on the hoof as it were), their motivations, any given situation they find themselves, the implications and potential of that situation, their relationship, the current state of their relationships and so on, and articulate all of it in the most intelligent way possible.
Naturally, the author is privy to it all and generously passes her or his insights on to his reader. And no thought, no private deep insight, is ever hidden from the author.
Some, most probably the reader who persuades her or himself that they are ‘passionate about literature’, love that kind of stuff, of course, and they cannot get enough of it. This reader, who is not in the least ‘passionate about literature’ and who just enjoys reading, whether fiction or non-fiction, does not. But, as the irritating liberal in me insists, each to her or his own, so best leave it at that.
With Book Two, the style becomes simpler, less ‘literary’. There is still a great deal of the ‘from the point of view of God, your creator’ – that is ‘the author’ – who knows your thoughts, your hopes, your fears and I don’t know what else and keeps the reader informed, but, to be fair, that was largely the mode of ‘serious literature’ when Tender was written, and it carries on until the present day.
And the suspicion is still not be far off that Fitzgerald really did want to create ‘serious literature’ – he had long suffered from, and did not like, the accusation that he was not quite ‘a serious writer’, despite The Great Gatsby.
In Book Two as later in Book Three, we also catch glimpses of what in his previous writing was attractive in Fitzgerald’s work. It was a rather sardonic, almost satirical, take on mankind which, for me at least, added at its brief appearances, a welcome relief. But those occasions when it occurs are only glimpses, and it is as though they intrude despite what Fitzgerald is attempting to do elsewhere.
Books Two and Three also take on a more narrative note than was present in Book One. Yes, in Book One we get the back story of an ingenue Hollywood actress who plays a – seemingly – crucial role in developments, but was most certainly not the guiding force of Book One.
In Books Two and Three on the other hand ‘things happen’ and the whole ‘theme’ of the novel is eventually concluded. The problem is, what is that theme?
The ‘plot’ as such – and it seems almost infra dig to discuss ‘plot’ in ‘serious literature’ when surely to goodness our minds should be on higher things – is oddly thin. I shan’t discuss it here as I do not want to have to tick the spoiler alert box, but from where I sit it might well have been told more briefly and better in a shorter work. ‘Short’, though, would not have allowed Fitzgerald much scope for fine writing, would it?
Again, and from where I sit, the characterisations don’t really come off. Is it enough simply to be told that a psychiatrist is ‘brilliant’? No, not really, or at least not in a work that has ambitions. Nicole, the mentally unstable female protagonist, is only ‘unstable’ because we are told she is, and when on one sole occasion in the novel she demonstrates here instability, it is almost by-the-by: there is no lead-up, not preparation to the incident at all.
Similarly with the marriage – and its eventual collapse – between the ‘brilliant’ psychiatrist and his erstwhile unstable younger patient who falls for him: the ‘why’ it fell apart is not at all clear. Nor did this reader buy in any real way that the brilliant psychiatrist fell into alcoholism: it is simply not established in any convincing way.
He liked a drink and disgraced himself once when in his cups. Well, so do I and so have I, but I’m not an alcoholic (and I haven’t had a drink for hours). To be blunt: we need more: what happened to ‘show, don’t tell’? In that sense the alcoholism of a secondary character is more convincing, though not a great deal, either.
Then there’s the quiet suggestion of inappropriate behaviour by the psychiatrist with one of his young female patients. The suggestion is rather too quiet to be taken seriously and too slight to be acknowledged in the novel as an indication that the psychiatrist has paedophilic tendencies as other readers suggest.
From the point of view of alcoholism and mental instability, we know that the novel to some extent describes the situation of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. But that is irrelevant: the reader is not at all concerned with the whys and wherefores of a novel’s genesis. All we have – and all we can judge – is the work itself.
To sum up: sorry, Scott, you didn’t crack it. Your novel is in part overwritten and does not convince. Shame you died comparatively young because by all accounts having found the love of a good woman and having more or less beaten the booze, you finally found a certain maturity and promise. But, sadly, you died at 41.
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