The Seduction of Dr. Diver

1. Dick Diver and Charm

In September 1929, about halfway along his tortuous journey from The Great Gatsby to Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that he’d spent almost five years on a novel dealing with “the insoluble problems of personal charm.” He was thinking of his central character, still not clearly defined, who began as a model of Gerald Murphy and segued into a psychiatrist with a gift for making others happy at a prohibitive cost to himself.

This is the man we meet in the beginning, the man in the jockey cap who gives “a quiet little performance” for his friends on Gausse’s beach, moving among the umbrellas, raking the sand, tidying up, dispensing sherry and excitement, making everyone happy. He wakes the beautiful young actress Rosemary Hoyt, sunning on the sand, with a warning against the toxic midday rays. It’s one thirty in the afternoon, he tells her, and adds that, “It’s not a bad time… It’s not one of the worst times of the day”—a commonplace remark that somehow promises a glittering future.

Two days later, Diver approaches Rosemary again on the beach, inviting her to join his group for lunch. She accepts, for he “seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her.” An hour or two thereafter, comparing him to Tommy Barban and Abe North, Rosemary reflects on the sources of his appeal.

Dick Diver…was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish and weather-burned, so was his short hair—a light growth of it rolled down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was talking and looking—and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?—glances fall upon us, curious or uninterested, nothing more. His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head, saw her choose him, heard the little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

Like many others, Rosemary succumbs to his charm. Diver’s ability to arouse “a fascinated and uncritical love” in nearly everyone except “a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious” is the engine that drives him. Sometimes, though, he looks back with awe “at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.” (Here, early in the book, Fitzgerald introduces the parallel of war and relations between the sexes that comes to dominate Tender Is the Night.)

Dr. Diver cannot help himself. There is a pleasingness about him that simply must be used. He wants to be wise and kind and brave, and he rather immodestly wants to be “a good psychologist—maybe… the greatest one that ever lived,” but above all he wants to be loved. He needs the admiration—the love—of others to validate his existence, and he tries hard to earn it. It is the source of his extraordinary appeal, and it is his greatest weakness.

Fitzgerald provides a list of the several people Diver “worked over” in the years before Rosemary appeared: “a French circus clown, Abe and Mary North, a pair of dancers, a writer, a painter, a comedienne from the Grand-Guignol, a half-crazy pederast from the Russian Ballet, a promising tenor they had staked to a year in Milan.” These disparate folk have in common a measure of artistic talent and a susceptibility to the charm that Dick Diver radiates. How did each of them feel, one wonders, when their benefactor’s captivating attentions were bestowed on someone else?

In his way Diver resembles another Rhodes Scholar from Yale, one who served as president of the United States and...