F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

One of the joys of reading many great novelists is the sheer quality of their observations, generalizations, aphorisms, and authorial asides. As I g0t deeper into F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (I'm now 50 pages from the end), I was reminded that FSF is a master of this. Within just a few pages one gets this remark from Nicole Diver:

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do--they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

And this moving observation from the consciousness of Rosemary Hoyt:

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

And this famous passage about Nicole Diver (the contemporary leftist critics who felt that Fitzgerald was insensitive to socio-economic realities must have skipped over this entirely):

Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole...

One of the things that amazes me about Fitzgerald is that he managed to live an inebriated lifestyle and write about it in an utterly clear-eyed, knowing manner simultaneously. Certain alcoholic authors write somewhat "drunkenly" (Malcolm Lowry), and others who may not have been alcoholic do so also (Thomas Wolfe). But Fitzgerald writes in a succinct and disciplined fashion at all times, and I think that the personal cost of maintaining that split between his personal self and his writing self, as much as the alcoholism itself, led to his early demise. It also helps explain why he is an author who many people, myself included, feel so tenderly about. He was a tragic figure, but there is something heroic about him too.

Tender Is the Night is not a novel that prompts thoughts of perfection the way The Great Gatsby does (or that his first novel, the inspired, inventive, and effervescent college novel This Side of Paradise, does for me). Fitzgerald had a hard time deciding on the structure of Tender Is the Night: the first edition (and usual printed version) is non-chronological, but there is also a version printed in 1951, edited by Fitzgerald's friend Malcolm Cowley, that is chronological and incorporates FSF's plans for a revision that he never got to undertake. Having only experienced the standard version, I'm not sure which would "play" better, but I have felt at times that FSF is so close to the material in this book that he hasn't got the expressive form quite right.

Still, it's not to be missed.