Among its many enlightenments, Andrew Turnbull’s biography Scott Fitzgerald establishes a truth essential to understanding the life of its subject: ’With Europe and the Murphys, Fitzgerald came as close as he ever would to finding perfection in the real world, and in a way the rest of his life was a retreat from this summit’ (176). By the sands of Antibes in the home they built and named Villa America, the Murphys created a salon—the centre, as Dirk Bogarde was to describe it, ’of a gorgeous, glittering carousel […] Looking back at them today sprawled in the sun, laughing and dancing, is a little like turning the pages of old bound copies of Vanity Fair and Tatler. Scintillating, beautiful, remote and far out of reach’ (8). For Archibald MacLeish, too, ’there was a shine to life wherever they were […] a kind of inherent loveliness’ (Vaill 7), and wherever in Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald provides a vision of graceful expatriation, there the Murphys are, shining still as the very spirit of expatriate style. They were the creators of those ’many fêtes’ that the novel’s winsome dedication seems to gift and bless them with, as though in a deed of reciprocal generosity. In a letter to Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald acknowledged both extensive debts and a profound entente: ’the book was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me’ (Tomkins 5).¹ The way the Murphys lived would indeed become the luminous blueprint for an American arcadia in Tender, and though Fitzgerald would often create permutations on the theme of paradise lost in his life and writing, only here in his final completed novel does he succeed in tracing fully the tragic arc of sublimity declining to ruin.

’Please do not use the phrase “Riviera” […] not only does it sound like the triviality of which I am so often accused, but also […] its very mention involves a feeling of unreality and unsubstantiality’ (Life in Letters 247). So wrote Fitzgerald to his editor Max Perkins in 1934, setting out his ideas for the dust-wrapper text of Tender Is the Night, and fearing that in the debt-haunted America of the 1930s an emphasis upon Riviera glamour would potentially damage the novel’s sales. Yet his recognition that together with its reputation for triviality, the Riviera would generate a further set of images concerning ’unreality’ is of more interest in retrospect. In a letter to Fitzgerald written soon after the novel’s publication, Gerald Murphy would also invoke unreality, though as a key feature of the book’s meaning and truth. If Andrew Turnbull saw that Fitzgerald had discovered ’perfection in the real world’ of Europe and the Murphys, Murphy himself realized that Tender Is the Night folded this perfect reality into the artifice of an even more transcendent design:

Looking back through the atmosphere of Fitzgerald’s novel, Murphy was able to see that expatriation had partly provided him with the climate in which creativity could flower, if not with the prerequisite condition for entry into the beautiful land of unreality/artifice. In another related phrase invoking the potential of the human imagination, Murphy also told Fitzgerald, ’it’s not what we do, but what we do with our minds that counts’ (Tomkins 123), thus giving modern inflection to that dangerous liaison which for Henry James had so characterized the European scene for American visitors. In James’ fiction, the European environment is often experienced as a beguiling playground in which Americans are transformed into lotus-eaters. So Roderick Hudson declares himself to be ’an idle useless creature, [who] should probably be even more so in Europe than at home’ (22). Activity for James’ expatriates is often sublimated by their attraction to European passivity. As Hudson muses, ’it is evidently only a sort of idealised form of loafing: a passive life in Rome, thanks to the number and quality of one’s impressions, takes on a very respectable likeness to activity’ (23). Although Fitzgerald’s novel too is concerned with expatriation as flânerie, it also counters this with a revised model of the expatriate engagé, the ’man with repose’ (the phrase is Diver’s own, coined in the opening paragraph of Book 1, chapter xii), one who could, like Murphy himself, exemplify a model of calm and creative being, of ’what we do with our minds’, self-consciously trying for new means of survival amidst the ruins of an inter-war Europe.

It was Edmund Wilson who first persuaded the young Fitzgerald to continue his cultural education in France, urging him to ’come to Paris for the summer. Settle down and learn French and apply a little French leisure and measure to that restless and jumpy nervous system. It would be a service to American letters: your novels would never be the same afterwards’ (Wilson 63). Wilson was right about that, for having enrolled in Gerald and Sara Murphy’s school of style in the summer of 1924, Fitzgerald found there, along with ’many fêtes’, the influence of a refined ménage which seemed to him an ideal expression of human life. But in the aftermath of the Great War, such a context could also embody style as heroism. As Fitzgerald himself remarked, Dick Diver ’is after all a sort of superman […] an approximation of the hero’; he recognises that ’taste is no substitute for vitality but in [Tender Is the Night] it has to do duty for it. It is one of the points on which he must never show weakness as Siegfried could never show physical fear’ (Turnbull, Letters 587). For Fitzgerald, as for his American contemporary Ernest Hemingway, style, taste, deportment, became an index of existential integrity. ’Grace under pressure’ was Hemingway’s definition of courageous poise,³ and grace and style were two sides of the same coin, a currency that becomes the gold standard by which Diver judges himself and others. The novel lays stress upon his exceptionalism in this regard, as his tranquil enclave is progressively attacked by the invasion of ’life itself’, stepping in to blunder, scar and destroy. In many ways this novel is about betrayal, Dick Diver’s ’betrayal at the hands of a world he thought he could manipulate’ (Vaill 229), a betrayal so closely based upon Gerald Murphy’s own. Murphy remembered telling Fitzgerald:

Reality in this sense is something that one is the victim of, arriving upon one’s head in random blows of unreasonable fate. It is certainly no coincidence that the sign outside Villa America, the Murphys’ home in Antibes (which would become the Divers’ ’Villa Diana’ in the novel), was designed by Murphy himself to show a dramatically split graphic, with the broken star and stripes in sharp contrast to each other. As described by Amanda Vaill, ’The effect is striking visually, but also metaphorically: somehow the villa, like its owners, exists in two worlds at once—France and America, the real and the imagined’ (160).

And in Tender Is the Night it was that ’unreal’ world, that imagined great good place, which had its fleeting correlative in the beach apartheid close by Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers. There, for those within Dick Diver’s orbit of invention, the unimportant matter of ’reality’ gives way to something else, ’something [that] made them unlike the Americans [Rosemary] had known of late’ (6). This ’something’ is rooted in Diver’s ability to create a new, playful sense of being for his group of fellow expatriates. His first appearance is indeed that of a master of comic invention, ’a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights’, entertaining his guests, who are captivated by his vitality. Rosemary understands that ’under small hand-parasols’ (5) this group of Americans are being subtly altered by Diver’s ’quiet little performance’ (6), becoming, in fact, something atypical in the process as he ’moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face’ (6). The narrator’s identification of the particular type of comedy is important: burlesque is a generic term for parody, caricature and travesty and is particularly effective when customs, manners, institutions—individually or as types—are ripe for debunking. Targeting the ridiculous by incongruous imitation, burlesque presents the trivial with ironic seriousness. Audience pleasure comes largely from recognizing the subject of the ridicule, and in this scene Dick Diver provides a textbook burlesque directed at a subject identified in Mrs Abrams’ comment to Rosemary a few lines later, ’there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach’ (7). The phrase reiterates the narrator’s own earlier scene-setting comments upon expatriate beach-life on the summer Riviera, where in tedious occupancy ’British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England […] to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation’ (4). A stultifying formality therefore reigns supreme here, as ’a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows’ (4). This is the dominant reality in place at Antibes, ’the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude’ (5).

While there is certainly a strong element of épater le bourgeois in Diver’s stylized performance, this first glimpse reveals even more about the style of his relationship to those in his circle—the effort to control the discourse, the ability to define for them an alternative, more charged correspondence between inner life and outer reality. The language gives it away—his group being ’held in suspension by his grave face’, an early instance of that magical dialectic so manifest at the Divers’ dinner parties at Villa Diana, where leisure and conviviality transcend themselves to approach an ultimate civility of human relationship and therefore to inhabit ’the rarer atmosphere of sentiment’:

Here, the imagery of transcendence is considerably more advanced: the table becomes a stage, the guests transported as though to a chambre separé where an occult, hierarchical bonding can take place. The cameo scene at the beach had introduced the idea of Diver as gifted entertainer, a man capable of holding his audience in suspension—an image repeated here in the wonderfully exact conceit of the table as a floating ’mechanical dancing platform’—and in the scene above he appears more completely as a magus bestowing an almost mystical union, stemming from his apparent expansion of presence. The scene is justifiably renowned. It is perhaps the most elaborate instance of Fitzgerald’s notion of Diver as ’after all a sort of superman’, endowed with special powers that allow him to ’warm and glow and expand’ in a spirit of ultimate conviviality. In terms of this essay the scene also personifies Murphy’s idea of life as invention, of the transformative fruits of ’what we do with our minds’ as well as exemplifying a new vision of an enlightened leisure class. That idea finds its way without amendment into Fitzgerald’s imagination of the Divers, as Abe North tells Rosemary that Dick and Nicole ’have to like [the beach]. They invented it’ (17).

In a letter of 1934 to Max Perkins, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote of Tender as ’a book disturbing, bitter and beautiful. […] Fitzgerald visualizes people not in their immediate setting, from the human point of view—but in time and space—almost, you might say, with the divine detachment’ (Tarr 140). The novel’s vision of serenity is of course intensified by the bitter cargo that lies in wait for Dick Diver and others in his circle, but in a scene such as the above, Rawlings is absolutely right—the angels do hold sway. Fitzgerald admired Matthew Arnold and agreed with his warnings about the gathering threats to civilized values posed by the modern world. In College of One Sheilah Graham remembers how he stressed the need to defend against this, recalling his approval of Arnold’s line: ’the question, how to live, is itself a moral idea’ (99). The above scene responds to this question (which is also a question about the virtues of style) in its celebration of life shared with intensity of purpose, a mystical, almost Yeatsian vision of unity. In referring to the novel’s ’divine detachment’ was Rawlings alluding specifically to just ’such a detachment from the world’ as described in the above passage? As Yeats’ charting of spiritual transcendence in ’Sailing to Byzantium’ is based upon a necessary renunciation of the physical world, since ’That is no country for old men’ (217), so the Divers also dispel any regrets for what the narrator calls ’that country well left behind’ (34).

The Divers’ dinner party presents a paradigm of carefully cultivated licence, of the freedoms deriving in part from what Henry James called ’dispatriation’.⁵ Perhaps such a scene comes as close to a vision of benign exile as it is possible to get. R. P. Blackmur, however, pointed to one important paradox at the heart of American expatriates’ generic experience, noting that they ’sought to be exiled, to be strangers in a far land, and sweetly to do nothing; that is to say, they wanted to be men of the world divorced from the world’ (69). So one version of expatriation is manifest in a rare kind of worldly transcendence, mediated through invention/artifice, but Fitzgerald’s expatriates also take their place as ’men of the world’ in Blackmur’s terms. As Malcolm Bradbury has written, Dick and Nicole Diver ’belong willingly enough to history, which, as Fitzgerald aptly says, manifests itself day-to-day, as style. […] Thus they live, like the Fitzgeralds themselves, by history’s daily workings, through styles and images, this week’s haunting jazz songs and the summer’s new resorts’ (355). The Divers certainly show themselves to be alive to the appeal of the avant-garde. They are ’too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat’ (76), but even here Dick is untrammelled, inventive (this characteristic Fitzgerald also derived from Gerald Murphy, who is described most wonderfully by André Le Vot as ’the corsair of La Garoupe […] a fount of fashions […] there was something in him of the impresario’ [207]) and influential. In a Europe that was becoming increasingly stylocentric, they set the fashions that others followed: ’the sailor trunks and sweaters they had bought in a Nice back street’ were ’garments that afterward ran through a vogue in sills among the Paris couturiers’ (281). Be it a small patch of sand on a Riviera beach or a dinner party, the Divers’ style is appreciated by the gens de monde. In a description that recalls Jay Gatsby’s lustrous automobile, ’bright with nickel […] and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns’ (The Great Gatsby 51), Fitzgerald even has Dick commandeer ’the car of the Shah of Persia’ so that his party guests can see Paris on a joyride: ’Its wheels were all silver, so was the radiator. The inside of the body was inlaid with innumerable brilliants’ (77).

In a 1927 interview Fitzgerald indicated his appreciation of Gallic civilization in matters of taste and breeding, remarking that ’France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners’ (Le Vot 223). Intelligence, good manners, and what Henry Dan Piper would call ’the tragic power of charm’ (211)⁶ are all in view when Rosemary first meets Dick Diver. In his voice she finds immediately that promise of romantic, almost effortless invention: ’he would open up whole new worlds for her’ (16). She intuits quickly that Diver, Barban and North are different from the men of her previous acquaintance, ’the rough and ready good fellowship of directors […] and the indistinguishable mass of college boys’ (19). In contrast these people manifest a new kind of self-possession. Rosemary sees that they share an essential difference, one that at this early stage seems Fitzgerald’s answer to the jibe at American expatriate degeneration in Hemingway’s Fiesta (1927):

Instead of atrophy in the type, however, Rosemary finds integrity, for ’[even] in their absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning, she felt a purpose, a working over something, a direction, an act of creation different from any she had known’ (19). These men are not only integrated with their immediate environment, they are also involved creatively with it, intuitive auteurs. It is perhaps also significant that the group is here easily embraced by organic, natural imagery: they are ’complete’ like the morning itself—they have not, in fact, ’lost touch with the soil’. Compare this depiction to the narrator’s treatment of the effeminate Campion in the same section: he is the man without repose, rejected by the natural as he ’tried to edge his way into a sand-coloured cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky’ (11).

Barban, Diver, North: each in his own distinctive way personifies a version of selfhood that challenges orthodoxy; each exemplifies a disjunction between ego and collectivity that enables him to exploit possibilities of feeling and response which others have either abandoned or failed to realize. In this sense Tender is a novel that confronts concepts of identity and convention. The condition of being an expatriate can be precisely that—a condition of being. Yet there are those who are able to escape confinement within expatriate stereotypes, to escape the poverty of encountering life through a toneless lens. The novel’s twelfth chapter begins with the characters (Diver, the Norths, Rosemary) poking fun at neurotic American mannerisms, played off against Dick Diver’s notion of himself as the ’man with repose’ (51). Scrutinizing their fellow diners in a high-class Paris restaurant, they put Diver’s claim that ’no American men had any repose, except himself’ (51)⁷ successfully to the test, as one by one they show the signs of nervous impulse: ’a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair […] or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears’ (52). This scene is a vignette of all that bourgeois respectability cannot contain, being maladjusted to its environment, a condition exacerbated for these Americans by their displacement in Europe. It is a society of no repose, peopled by a moneyed class that is ill at ease with itself, filled with wanderers who are uncomfortable with themselves and their bodies.⁸ If this is typical of post-war expatriate café society, it is a society without wit or elegance. The patrons’ restless tics and twitches are signs of a more general enervation in the culture.

Fitzgerald’s chronicle of modern neurosis interacts with the surrounding sociological, cultural, economic setting. Expatriation is a factor in all of those contexts and style is used as an index of the eclipse of the old order. As Nicole Diver realizes when she and Dick visit the beach at Antibes together for the last time, its boundaries have quite literally disappeared, crumbled beneath the sand: ’Let him look at it—his beach […] he could search it for a day and find no stone of the Chinese wall he had once erected around it, no footprint of an old friend’ (280). In its stead there is a new style of expatriate presence—an idiom of abject mediocrity, the presence of no style at all. This new reality is entirely without nuance, a democratized mass without discrimination. Fitzgerald’s narrator is withering in judgement here, telling us that ’Now the swimming place was a “club”, though, like the international society it represented, it would be hard to say who was not admitted’ (281). As in the novel’s opening scenes on the beach, body and form are used to indicate essential values. There are still the beach umbrellas, but simply too many to matter, so many in fact that Nicole has to watch ’Dick peer about for the children among the confused shapes and shadows of many umbrellas’ (280). When the bodies are individuated, they are unlovely, a perception apparently acknowledged even by their owners, since ’few people swam any more in that blue paradise […] most of Gausse’s guests stripped the concealing pajamas from their flabbiness only for a short hangover dip at one o’clock’ (281). Here is repose without style. If the Divers, and the Murphys on whom their lives were based, were ’masters in the art of living’ (Tomkins 7) on the Riviera, they were shown the way by convincing old-world aristocrats who had come there to die—in the grand style. In a passage stripped almost verbatim from another published in The Saturday Evening Post of 1924,⁹ Fitzgerald’s narrator paints a beguiling picture of that ancien régime. The very names of Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo whisper ’of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha’s eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days’ (15). Though Diver is no blue-blood,¹⁰ the narrator’s description of him as representing ’the exact furthermost evolution of a class’ (21) suggests that in sensibility if not in breeding he is the natural inheritor of what is left of that civilization.

Certainly Diver’s return is to a place that has by 1929 become effete, and the narrator is careful to make that return carry overtones of lèse majesté: ’Probably it was the beach he feared, like a deposed ruler secretly visiting an old court’ (280). In valediction, ’his beach’ has become, in the narrator’s words (though the strong implication is that they represent Nicole’s thoughts), ’perverted now to the tastes of the tasteless’ (280), an intriguing use of language that suggests the rape of a natural environment by a counterworld of vulgar kitsch. All of the subtlety, the deep amity that went into the Divers’ art of living has given way to rampant philistinism. The Riviera summers of a lost, aristocratic order are most certainly gone, buried under a whole apparatus of meretricious form. Both style and the natural (for in Fitzgerald’s aesthetic, they are congruent) have been overwhelmed by an odious flourishing of ’new paraphernalia’: ’the trapezes over the water, the swinging rings, the portable bath-houses, the floating towers, the searchlights from last night’s fetes, the modernistic buffet, white with a hackneyed motif of endless handlebars’ (281). Diver was right to fear the beach, or at least what has been done to it. Again we see that in this novel style is emblematic of cultural change, though in this case the change is an affliction. Nicole ’was sorry’ (280) for Dick, whose instincts seem lost amid such meaninglessness. Yet of the two, Nicole is better equipped to adjust towards the future: whatever one side of her ancestry suggests, her essential self easily shakes free of old-world values. The capacity to adapt to modern conditions, however unseemly, is an integral part of her deepest structure. She is in this respect profoundly centred in the modern. Whereas for Dick adaptation often involves an imaginative assimilation of new prospects, for Nicole change is rather a matter of reversion to origins, since she ’had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins or wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self’ (280). In this radical sense she is much more at home in the new world than her husband, whose expatriation, as the above return to the beach suggests, has become akin to a state of profound homelessness. Indeed, his exiled condition will increasingly resemble that of a refugee, driven from place to place by social upheaval and personal crisis. In this sense Diver is a representative figure, for as George Steiner has written, the twentieth century inaugurated ’the age of the refugee’, an environment of extreme alienation: ’No exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more demanding. It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and people by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language’ (11).

Faced by the ’feat of adaptation’ now required of him in this subverted culture, Diver’s capacities are ineffectual. He is defeated not by European standards, but, as Hemingway’s Bill Gorton put it, by ’false European standards’ which have turned the simplicity of the Divers’ beach colony into a mixture of amusement park and ’club’. Modernity is here defined by such pretence and artificiality, and although Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin is right to draw attention to the sensuality of the novel’s Riviera setting, to its appeal deriving from ’a life lived in closer harmony with the body and with nature’ (226), she over-emphasizes the contrast between Dick and Nicole in this regard, for he is more than capable of sensual engagement. It is indeed Nicole herself who acknowledges this, remembering wistfully their vie plaisante—a life emanating from Dick’s openness towards natural energy, ’the ritual of the morning time, the quiet restful extraversion towards sea and sun—many inventions of his, buried deeper than the sand under the span of so few years’ (281). For Nicole now, Dick has become ’a tarnished object of art’ (282) and her new state of resurgent vitality can only emerge fully once she has departed his orbit, ’his beach’. The narrator goes so far as to tell us that ’she hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick’s sun’ (289). The operative term in this figure is, however, that of life as playful invention. Nicole refuses any longer to be defined in these terms, opting instead for the reality of banal betrayal.

In 1935 Gerald Murphy wrote to Fitzgerald of his premonitory fear that his happiness would be lost to ’life itself’, telling him that ’in my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot, the children’ (Tomkins 125). Diver’s ’inventions’, now buried under Riviera sand, are exactly analogous to Murphy’s youthful fount of ’inventions’: both have been destroyed by the advance of an amoral realism. For though George Steiner has reminded us that ’the liberating function of art lies in its singular capacity to “dream against the world,” to structure worlds that are otherwise’ (34), Fitzgerald’s novel insists that the imagination of Dick Diver can only resist reality’s darkening shadow for so long. Nicole is right—Dick has indeed become ’a tarnished object of art’, and as his own ’dreams against the world’ are increasingly threatened by the appeal of baser appetites, so Nicole is the beneficiary. Her affair with Barban is conditioned not by the application of style or tasteful discrimination but by the appeal of an opposing motive—the attraction of moral chaos: ’all summer she had been stimulated by watching people do exactly what they were tempted to do and pay no penalty for it’ (291). As she crosses herself with Chanel Sixteen and waits for Barban, her ’earnest Satan’ (294), she has no vision, no plan; she only knows that the change is coming and that she will not stand in its way. Her primary desire at this stage is not even marital emancipation, instead ’she enjoys the caviare of potential power […] she wanted a change’ (291). With ’the plush arrogance of a top dog’ (301) she knows that nothing can prevent her taking what she wants and needs: a new freedom, an unfettered licence to indulge her passion.

For the present Nicole is a free agent, but Fitzgerald’s narrator clearly signals that in the future her moral bills will be called in. Adultery ensures her entry to the post-war mess of collapsing values, to what Adamov called ’le temps de l’ignominie’¹¹ (106). Her ’vulgar business’ (291) with Barban is, she realizes, an unemotional act of self-indulgence. In the final push to claim her freedom and at the same time give Doctor Diver his liberty, she uses all weapons at her disposal, even her ’unscrupulousness against his moralities’ (302). Just like the new breed of expatriates who ’pay no penalty’ for self-indulgence, so Nicole has the freedom of knowing that she need never commit herself to anything. Her visionary reach is, however, limited, and ’she does not seem […] to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on’ (291). For now, however, an act of easy betrayal is the line of least resistance, and after her return to Diver from Barban ’[she] wandered about the house rather contentedly, resting on her achievement. She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction’ (300). As Fitzgerald’s narrator reminds us, one of Nicole’s most potent weapons is that she is equipped ’with the opportunistic memory of women’; this allows her to tell Barban accomplished lies about her passion for him, and hardly to remember the times ’when she and Dick had possessed each other in secret places around the corners of the world’ (300). Yet what Tavernier-Courbin calls ’the complicated and intellectual world of Dick Diver’ survives as the truest one nevertheless, and in the end Nicole’s rebellion could never damage it radically, nor defeat his deep-rooted moral intelligence, ’sometimes exercised without power but always with substrata of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack’ (301). In the end, ’Nicole felt outguessed, realizing that […] Dick had anticipated everything’ (311).

J. Gerald Kennedy finds correctly that writing by American expatriates ’tends to reflect both an intensified awareness of place and an instinctive preoccupation with the identity of the alienated self’ (26), and indeed the final scenes of Tender show that, for Diver, place was in the end perhaps even more important than people.¹² There is both practicality and humour in his farewell to his Riviera housekeepers: ’he kissed the Provençal girl who helped with the children. She had been with them for almost a decade and she fell on her knees and cried until Dick jerked her to her feet and gave her three hundred francs’ (311). He dispenses with the formality of polite manners at the close as he tells his fellow expatriate Mary North, ’You’re all so dull’ (313). When, demanding a final showdown with Diver, Barban interrupts the Divers’ joint visit to the barber at the Carleton Hotel in Cannes, Fitzgerald even provides a considerable element of the ludicrous in Diver’s matter-of-fact refusal to allow him any opportunity for macho posturing or the confrontation he wanted. This interruption is only the first of a series of apparently farcical breaks in the proceedings, one of which is the commotion caused by the incongruous arrival of the Tour de France outside. The meeting subsequently takes place nearby, at the ironically named Café des Alliés, but not before Tommy gets his row from a still fully towelled and resentful Nicole: ’“But my hair—it’s half cut”’ (307). She ’wanted Dick to take the initiative, but he seemed content to sit with his face half-shaved matching her hair half-washed’, his dishevelled appearance being obviously reflected in the exhausted backmarkers and losers of the Tour de France, ’indifferent and weary’ (310). Yet Diver is still the master of ceremonies, maintaining a code of permissible expression: ’“Well, then,” said the Doctor, “since it’s all settled, suppose we go back to the barber shop”’ (310), thus concluding a scene of abject reality which could not be transfigured. ’So it had happened—and with a minimum of drama’ (344), and Nicole was right—Dick had anticipated everything.

His final action is, explicitly, to ’take a last look at Gausse’s beach’ rather than at its many occupants, who in those last moments include Nicole and Baby Warren, and finally Nicole and Tommy. It may be hardly surprising that the sight of Nicole and Tommy is precisely what he wishes to avoid at the last, but even the elements are now armed against his moods: ’[a] white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky’ (311-12) delineates betrayal in sharp relief, etched as myth, ’a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky’ (313). Colour and realistic perspective are here subordinated to the bleak monochrome of archetype. For although Dick is looking down on the beach and thus on his wife and her lover ’from the high terrace’ (314) above, Fitzgerald chooses sky, rather than the more logical sand, to provide the boundless backdrop for a mythic theme. Any poetry of place, of subtle invention is impossible in such a harsh light. The Riviera set is still dazzling, but Diver’s show is over. Perhaps in the end the beach was the only place that Diver could call home, the only place in which he had been not estranged, but in ownership, as Nicole recognizes: ’“This is his place—in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick”’ (312). Indeed this impression had from the start been facilitated by Fitzgerald’s language, which domesticated the beach in homely metaphor as a ’bright tan prayer rug’ (3). It may be Gausse’s beach in fact, but it was more creatively and exclusively ’[our] beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile’ (20).

For Fitzgerald himself what might be termed ’good expatriation’ was very much linked to relative isolation from the crowd, more akin to voluntary exile than expatriation. ’No one comes to the Riviera in summer, so we expect to have a few guests and to work’ (161), says Nicole in a dream of hope. Loneliness as a theme increasingly became a defining zone in Fitzgerald’s life and work, one in which his characters were tested and challenged. In loneliness he found a kind of emancipation, a freedom from the tyranny of social obligations. He also saw himself as constitutionally suited to the classic model of the sequestered artist.¹³ For Fitzgerald on the Riviera in his annus mirabilis of 1924, expatriation was about being alone to work, with loneliness as the key to great things—and he knew it, writing in a letter of that year as he worked on The Great Gatsby: ’I hope I don’t see a soul for six months […] I feel absolutely self-sufficient + I have a perfect hollow craving for lonliness [sic] […] I shall write a novel better than any novel ever written in America’ (Life in Letters 68). Yet only a year later he would pen a bittersweet testimony to this paradise lost to the crowd of expatriates who joined him in France, good expatriation turned bad, as he told John Peale Bishop in a famous letter: ’there was no one at Antibes this summer except me, Zelda. The Valentinos, the Murphy’s, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the McLieshes [sic] […] just a real place to rough it and escape from the world’ (Life in Letters 126). Similarly Dick Diver’s final meeting with Nicole and Tommy is interrupted not only by the arrival of the Tour de France, but by the ominous figure of an American photographer, in search of Riviera gold and in his way an eloquent expression of all that has gone wrong with Diver’s world. Roughing it in splendid isolation on the Riviera is no longer an option with company like his. Rarely was publicity more unwelcome, and privacy more endangered:

This invasion is malign and inexorable, the sullying of the private by the public, a note struck again in the novel’s penultimate chapter when Diver notices that ’an American photographer from the A. and P. worked with his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps’ that led to Gausse’s beach (312). The wolves are now at the very door of Diver’s domain, drawn by the scent of exclusivity and difference. The result is a phenomenon we have all had to get used to in the years since, the surrender of the private sphere to the public, with a concomitant erosion of the virtues of private discourse, including inward imaginative energies.

This essay began with memories of the Murphys and their special charisma for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in Tender was able to deepen their influence through his vision of their enlightened expatriation. It is fitting, then, to close with Gerald Murphy’s own memory of Fitzgerald, provoked by having seen the 1964 film version of Tender. Murphy went to the cinema without Sara, who had refused to go, presumably because she feared that moving pictures would do no more justice to the reality of Riviera life in the early 1920s than did the kind of photography satirized by Fitzgerald in the novel. If so, she was right. Murphy recalled that as he watched the movie the vast auditorium was completely empty apart from himself and ’an elderly charwoman sweeping the back rows’ (Tomkins 128). The film ’disregarded everything except the battle of the sexes and dismissed the lure of the era with a nostalgic ridiculing of the Charleston’ (Tomkins 128). Bad it was, yet Murphy remembered that, driving home afterwards in the snow,

Source

From Twenty-first Century Readings of “Tender Is the Night,” edited by William Blazek and Laura Rattray, pp. 143-159. Copyright © 2007 by Liverpool University Press. Reprinted with permission of Liverpool University Press.

Works Cited