"So Much Fun—So Long Ago": F. Scott Fitzgerald'S Tender Is the Night

"A strange thing is that in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better," Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, the editor he shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald at Charles Scribner's Sons. He quickly shared the same opinion with the author: "The more I think back to it the better book Tender Is the Night is." Hemingway's second thoughts were in sharp contrast to the censure he had given Fitzgerald a year earlier, in 1934, when the novel was published: "Not as good as you can do." Hemingway's appreciation of Tender Is the Night would wax over time; by 1950 he considered it "the best of his books."

This reversal of judgment is emblematic of Fitzgerald's literary status. When he died of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of 44, all nine of his books were as good as out of print. (He had been humiliated when he was unable to purchase copies in two Los Angeles bookstores.) In the Thirties, Fitzgerald has been thought of "as an age rather than a writer," Budd Schulberg recalled, "and when the economic stroke of 1929 began to change the sheiks and flappers into unemployed boys or underage girls, we consciously, a little belligerently, turned our backs on Fitzgerald." Before she met him, "though I had never read anything he wrote," Sheilah Graham, the Hollywood gossip columnist who would become Fitzgerald's lover, described women "I wanted to chide" as "old-fashioned F. Scott Fitzgerald types." So identified with the Twenties was Fitzgerald that Time magazine's obituary did not mention Tender Is the Night.

In comparison with his celebrated contemporaries, Fitzgerald thought himself the tortoise, not the hare: "My one hope is to be endorsed by the intellectually elite." Such proved to be the case. Almost as rapidly as he had achieved his original reputation—in 1920 Fitzgerald awoke to find himself famous, following publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise—his posthumous prestige established itself.

Five years after his death, his Princeton classmate (and avowed "intellectual conscience") Edmund Wilson published The Crack-Up, which included encomia from luminaries like T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and John Dos Passos. A further case for Fitzgerald's literary importance was presented in the first biography, Arthur Mizener's superb The Far Side of Paradise. In the same year, 1951, Alfred Kazin edited a collection of essays on The Great Gatsby, accelerating its ascent to canonization as The Great American Novel. As early as 1966 Philip Rahv was complaining that "it has been worked to death in the past fifteen years or so by both by Fitzgerald's critics and biographers" and "should be left alone for at least several decades." To no avail, of course: The Great Gatsby is established as a secondary-school staple, served as a sandwich between introduction and notes. Eight decades after its publication, it is Scribner's best-selling book.

Fitzgerald is "one of those novelists," Kazin writes, "whom it is possible, and even fascinating, to read over and over," adding "it has often been remarked that Tender Is the Night grows better on each rereading." Fitzgerald thought so: he judged his novel "a book that only gives its full effect on second reading."

The story is simple. Richard Diver, a 28-year-old psychiatrist of great promise, falls in love with an 18-year-old patient, Nicole Warren, who was rendered schizophrenic after being raped by her father. After they marry, Nicole's family wealth induces Diver to abandon his work and create a life of sophisticated glamour on the Riviera. After 10 years, Diver begins suffering "a lesion of enthusiasm"; his preternatural charm erodes and with it his ability to create an urbane cocoon for Nicole. As he deteriorates, she improves. Fully recovered and disillusioned with her degenerating husband, Nicole takes a lover, with whom she resumes her stylish hedonism. An increasingly foundering Diver returns to the United States and obscurity.

As with any worthwhile fiction, it is not the plot that matters, but...