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Tender is the Night
2010-11-10 12:40
F Scott Fitzgerald, who had achieved fame and fortune in 1925 with 'the Great Gatsby', returned to the Riviera in 1926 to put the finishing touches to a novel that - for all its shortcomings - perfectly captures the psychological shallowness and profundities of the rich set of thirties Europe and America.
The book was partly completed while Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were staying in the summer of 1926 in the villa which would later become the Hotel Belles Rives in Juan les Pins - although he was principally inspired by the Hôtel Eden Roc, which became the model for the novel's Hôtel des Étrangers.
In the character of Dick Diver, and all of those who swim and sink with
him, we can partly see the author himself - alternately caring,
neurotic, strong and uncontrolled - but Fitzgerald mainly modelled his protagonist on Gerald Murphy, a friend of Cole Porter and heir to the Mark Cross luxury leather goods company. Between them the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds came to define the Riviera Style, and held lavish parties in Antibes, attended by virtually every name one associates with that glittering slice of twentieth century history: Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and the famous dancer Isadora Duncan.
In a scene that reflects the resentful and acrimonious marriage of their
fictional counterparts, the schizophrenic Zelda grew jealous of Fitzgerald's interest in
Duncan, and histrionically threw herself down a flight of stairs. But a worse fate was to await Isadora Duncan herself, who in September 1927 was strangled when her scarf caught in the wheel of the Bugatti in which she was being driving down the Promenade des Anglais.
This novel, reflecting all that glamour and tragedy, has come to define the Riviera generation in the same way that Gatsby did for the Rhode Island set of the twenties. If you saw the movie 'A Good Woman' a couple of years ago - the one with Lady Windermere recast as Scarlett Johansson's American heiress) you were watching a kind of mash-up of Oscar Wilde with ... you guessed it - this book. Please read this disturbing and beautiful work. You will never regret it.