Reading Tender Is the Night as a Serial Text

Introductory Note

In a spring 2013 graduate seminar on F. Scott Fitzgerald at Penn State, I conducted an experiment with Tender Is the Night. I had the seminar members read the novel as a serial text in an attempt to duplicate, as nearly as possible, the experience that readers of Scribner’s Magazine might have had during the first four months of 1934, when the novel appeared there in installments. Our Special Collections Library at Penn State had purchased original issues of the magazine for January, February, March, and April of 1934—for my use in preparing the Cambridge University Press edition of the novel, published in the spring of 2012.¹ It was a relatively simple matter to have the four installments scanned from the original issues and reproduced, by photocopy, for the seminar students. Of the ten members of the class, five had read Tender Is the Night before—Dave McConnell, Krista Quesenberty, Derek Lee, Jace Gatzmeyer, and Justin Mellette. The other five students—Joe Greenwell, Michael Maguire, Robert Birdwell, John Schneider, and Emmet Quinn—were innocent subjects, with no knowledge of how the novel would progress or end.

I observed a few rules. I passed out the first installment at the first meeting of the class. Then I distributed the other installments, one by one, at two-week intervals. The students were not reading the serial text exactly as readers in 1934 would have, with four-week periods between sections. I had to improvise and use two-week breaks if we were to finish in one semester. Our method brought us as close as we could come to what the original readers of the serial might have experienced. The week after I had distributed an installment, we would discuss that section. I had to restrain myself from talking overly much about what was to come. Usually I managed, but not always. I told the students to keep a reading log, entering their assessments after finishing each section. And I admonished them not to read ahead in a copy of the full novel.

As nearly everyone in the Fitzgerald field knows, the serial text of Tender Is the Night is quite different from the book text. It is my impression, however, that almost no one in Fitzgerald studies has actually read the serial text. That text is difficult to access. Only a few libraries now possess runs of the old magazine, and the images (still under copyright) have not yet been made available on the Internet. Fitzgerald continued to revise the installments of Tender Is the Night until almost the last moment before publication; at the same time, perhaps on the same days, he was working on the other sections for the book text.

The Scribner’s editors removed some sexual innuendo from the magazine text. The discussion with Francisco, the homosexual son of Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real in book 3, chapter 2, was truncated, and Dick’s comment “I never did go in for making love to dry loins,” in book Three, Chapter XI, was cut (Tender 274–76, 346). Dick’s decline is slower and is traced in greater detail, an effect that is intensified by the slower rhythm of reading, with intervals between the four sections. The pen-and-ink illustrations by Edward Shenton are present in the serial, however, even more of them than appeared in the first edition. The serial text is surrounded by advertisements and often shares space on the pages with writings by other authors. The second and third installments begin with long catch-up paragraphs, apparently written by one of the Scribner’s editors, perhaps Maxwell Perkins. These paragraphs remind readers of what has come before in the novel. The biggest difference in reading Tender Is the Night as a serial is that one has time between each section to think about the characters and to wonder what...