F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Life

In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-eight years old, the celebrated author of The Great Gatsby, and married for better and for worse to Zelda. That summer of “1000 parties and no work” on the French Riviera, Scott and Zelda became close friends with Gerald and Sara Murphy, ten years older, whose life together seemed a thing of beauty. The art of living was for the Murphys their special project and particular gift. “For me,” Gerald would say, “only the invented part of life is satisfying, the unrealistic part … the invented part, for me, is what has meaning.”

The lives of the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys were intricately entwined for many years, and their history catalyzed Fitzgerald’s autobiographical art, as his notes for his work in progress indicate: “Parallel between actual case and case in novel.” Tender Is the Night demonstrates the imbrication of life and art, the contingency of Fitzgerald’s imagination, and the treachery of both the writer’s prerogative and the reader’s literal-mindedness. Partly because of its intimacy, the novel long gestated; ironically, because of its personal nature, the book was vastly undervalued when it finally appeared in 1934, and it never achieved the critical stature its author expected. Perhaps Fitzgerald was just too close to his work—or his fiction was too close to the bone. To this day the legend of Zelda and Scott is far better known than the heartbreaking narrative of Dick and Nicole Diver. Yet the many historical accounts of the Fitzgeralds help us see both the vexing relationship between autobiography and fiction and also the remarkable imaginative achievement of the novel.

Tender Is the Night begins as a portrait of Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, depicted as Dick and Nicole Diver. Here is Nicole Diver on the beach: “Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful.” Fitzgerald was one of several prominent artists attracted to the Murphys: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish—all visited the Murphys’ Villa America to make friends, art, and whoopee. Picasso sketched Sara in the same situation and pose that struck Fitzgerald, who was evidently smitten with both Murphys and conspicuously infatuated with Sara. Scott gazed on Sara gauchely and interrogated Gerald about their sex life. Sara complained, “Scott, you just think if you ask enough questions you’ll know all about people, but you don’t know anything about people. … You ought to know at your age that you can’t have theories about friends.” The Murphys regarded the Fitzgeralds with admiration and affection, bemusement and concern. Gerald considered Scott “fragile Irish”—a kindred spirit, romantic and vulnerable. As it turned out, Fitzgerald’s artistic genius proved more tough-minded, faithful less to friends or authenticity than to the unsparing rigor of imagination.

The Murphys provided Fitzgerald a model of grace and romance. Gerald and Sara were the ideal couple and perfect hosts: rich and generous, artistic and sophisticated. Scott’s initial plan for Tender Is the Night envisioned “the leisure class” at “their truly most brilliant and glamorous.” But Fitzgerald’s project gradually became far more ambitious and complex, focusing, he mused, on “a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest, giving in for various causes to the ideas of the haute bourgeoisie, and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent, and turning to drink and dissipation.” Dick Diver’s feelings of “emptiness and imposture, his betrayal at the hands of a world he thought he could manipulate, his struggle to come to terms with the renunciation of his idealism and his talent,” all that was autobiographical. For the tragic arc of his fictive hero—the aspirations and illusions, the devastating fall and partial illuminations—Fitzgerald dramatized his own experience. Gradually the Divers become much less like the Murphys and much more like the Fitzgeralds. Like almost everything Fitzgerald wrote, Tender Is the Night was...