Tender is the Night Read Free Page A

warning to Abe North, ‘You can come if you want to play anagrams’ (121) – transposed, the Spanish might read, ‘Senior, sorry, I see you Dad for real.’ Once witnessed, the indirect exposure of culpable fathers and consenting children proliferates and permutates.
Baby
Warren and
Daddy’s
Girl are simply surface clues to an associative network capable of determining interpretation. Both casual and condensed usage contributes to an emergent, if occult, pattern which ghosts characters and modifies action. For example, Dick’s cry as he assaults his policeman – ‘first I’ll fix this baby’ (246) – could pass as coincidence, were it not that withina page, Fitzgerald notes, across from Baby Warren’s hotel, two carabinieri ‘grotesque in swaddling capes’, one of them a ‘tall member of a short race’ (247). Sustained innuendo triggers a sub-plot pregnant with infantile desire. The same occult design probably prompts Dick to recall Fatty Arbuckle as he relieves Rosemary of her stained Parisian bed linen – Arbuckle’s career was cut short by charges of murderous attention to a child below the age of consent. Sexually poisonous adults achieve their nadir in the father of the American artist treated at Zugersee for nervous eczema: she dies ‘imprisoned’ in an ‘Iron Maiden’ of scab (202) as a result of neuro-syphilis, possibly contracted from her father at conception. Under-aged girls come no younger. The diagnosis is Dohmler’s; Dick does not want to hear it, insisting, ‘If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that’ (263). Why is he so secretive? During the patient’s decline, Dick ‘went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her’ (204). The doctor would ‘cherish’ the deep ‘mistake’ of incest, containing the ‘secret’ with the therapeutic advice, ‘We must all try to be good’ (204). As an ‘Iron Maiden’ his patient is profanely pure and quite beyond sexual exchange; Dick’s role as a surrogate good father is consequently eased. To conclude any account of what I would call the incest constellation with this example is to psychologize a sub-plot whose implications are far broader. The associative network should not be hidden within the psychology of one character, or indeed of the author, since Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with the social and financial status of the father (good or bad) requires that incest be understood as a trauma within which the sexual and the economic semanticize one another.
    The father, according to the incest taboo, must release his daughter into marriage outside the family. Warren’s greed is such that he fails in this exchange; he keeps his daughter for himself. The logic of accumulation transgresses the incest taboo, and Dick is hired to make good that transgression. The word ‘cure’ would be inappropriate. Dick as the good father supplants the bad father, restoring Nicole to integrity: she is made ‘complete’ and ‘hard’,terms carrying a Jamesian freightage. However, restoration involves blocking the trauma. Nicole is denied access to her father’s offence. Secret keys proliferate on Dick’s person: plainly he is the key to the case, but during Dohmler’s clinical report Dick remembers ‘a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet’, a key he had hidden in his mother’s top drawer (154). Janitorial duties started young. At some level Nicole recognizes Dick as her keeper: she bars Mrs McKisco from the troubled bathroom in the Villa Diana ‘because the key was thrown down the well’ (185), and Nicole knows who did it. Her allusion, redolent of