Tender is the Night Read Free

matter of time before its proprietor’s manners seem as mannered as those of her
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(1881). But for most of the long moment of Book I , the various places that Dick makes retain solidity.
    Symptomatically, their ‘curator’ learned his manners from his father, a master of the Victorian drawing-room:
    â€œOnce in a strange town when I was first ordained, I went into a crowded room and was confused as to who was my hostess. Several people I knew came toward me, but I disregarded them because I had seen a gray-haired woman sitting by a window far across the room. I went over to her and introduced myself. After that I made many friends in that town.” (223)
    The Reverend Diver is a clerical dandy more given to taste than to theology: his ‘good heart’ derives from ‘good instincts’ which are the creatures of his ‘honor’ and ‘courtesy’ and ‘beautifully cut clerical clothes’ (223). Dick throughout his life ‘referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done’ (222), again an indication of an archaic inclination. This element of preservation in Dick’s character brings us back to Veblen, for whom the leisured are characterized by ‘arrested spiritual development’ in so far as they resist change by indulging in ‘survival and reversion’ (Veblen 145).
    II
    I have undertaken two partial readings, each in itself misguided. In the former Dick embodies the flow of a globalizing capital. In the latter he epitomizes an archaic manner which rigidifies that flux. My readings are apparently contradictory, yet their conjunction may be explored since they meet in Nicole, who is the recipient both of Warren’s disruptive fortune and of Dick’s surety of manner. As such, she is the site of an untenable disturbance: taught to be ‘hard’, she is the conduit of all that softens. Fitzgerald locates the origin of her instability within the act of paternal incest.
    Early in Book II we learn that Dick is a psychiatrist who has taken on, nominally for life, the damaged child of ‘feudal’ monies(142), under a ‘ducal’ name (175); in other words, the spoiled daughter of accumulated capital, spoiled by her father. For Nicole Dick creates his sureties, displacing her ‘bad’ father by means of the manners of his ‘good’ father. Before discussing the narrative implications of the incest trauma, it is necessary to recognize both its centrality and its pervasiveness. Devereux Warren’s sexual pathology keeps cropping up.
Tender is the Night
is beset by ill-disguised fathers and under-aged girls. In Rome (city of papal fathers), on his way to court to be tried for striking a plain-clothed policeman, Dick learns that a native of Frascati has been arrested for raping and killing a child: in court Dick cries out, ‘I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—’ (256). Disturbed by the recent death of his own father, Dick perceives himself as a child molester because, by transference, he may be, in Nicole’s eyes, the molesting father. In which case, Dick is two fathers: the good reverend father and the bad Devereux Warren. Paternity becomes him but is always liable to become something else. He meets Rosemary on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, objects that he has no intention of marrying his daughter Topsy (278) and threatens his son Lanier with divorce (285). As though enough were enough, Fitzgerald cut from the last page of the manuscript the suggestion that Dr Diver of Lockport is ‘entangled’ not simply with ‘a girl who worked in a grocery store’, but with a sixteen-year-old.
    Not all the paternal duplicities relate directly to Dick. The Chilean aristocrat who begs treatment for his homosexual and alcoholic son is called Señor Pardo Y Cuidad Real – I offer in my own defence Dick’s