Twenty-First Century Readings of 'Tender is the Night'

236 Pages·2007·1.724 MB·English

by  William Blazek, Laura Rattray

Introduction
Twenty-First-Century Readings of
Tender Is the Night

TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd ii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3344
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd iiii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
Introduction
Twenty-First-Century Readings
of Tender Is the Night

Edited by
William Blazek and Laura Rattray
liverpool university press
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd iiiiii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
First published 2007 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool, L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2007 Liverpool University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photo copying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available
ISBN 978-1-84631-071-3 cased
978-1-84631-072-0 limp
Typeset in Apollo by Koinonia, Bury
Printed and bound in the European Community
by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd iivv 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
Introduction
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations viii
Introduction
William Blazek and Laura Rattray 1
1 ‘Can’t We Put it in Writing?’: Some Short Precursors to
Tender Is the Night
Bonnie Shannon McMullen 16
2 Tender Is the Night, ‘Jazzmania’, and the Ellingson Matricide
James L. W. West III 34
3 Sanatorium Society: The ‘Good’ Place in Tender Is the Night
Linda De Roche 50
4 ‘Some Fault in the Plan’: Fitzgerald’s Critique of Psychiatry
in Tender Is the Night
William Blazek 67
5 An ‘Unblinding of Eyes’: The Narrative Vision of Tender Is
the Night
Laura Rattray 85
6 Si le soleil ne revenait pas: Swiss Clockwork Gone Mad in
Tender Is the Night
Marie-Agnès Gay 103
7 ‘A Unity Less Conventional But Not Less Serviceable’:
A Narratological History of Tender Is the Night
Kirk Curnutt 121
8 American Riviera: Style and Expatriation in Tender Is the Night
Michael K. Glenday 143
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd vv 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
vi Contents
9 ‘Out Upon the Mongolian Plain’: Fitzgerald’s Racial and Ethnic
Cross-Identifying in Tender Is the Night
Chris Messenger 160
10 Gender Anxiety: The Unresolved Dialectic of Fitzgerald’s
Writing
Faith Pullin 177
11 Tender Is the Night and the Calculus of Modern War
James H. Meredith 192
12 Reading Fitzgerald Reading Keats
Philip McGowan 204
Notes on Contributors 221
Index 224
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd vvii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
Acknowledgements
Liverpool Hope University provided research funding for the production
of this volume, and the editors gratefully acknowledge that support. The
staff at Liverpool University Press and the contributors to the collection
have all made the project a pleasure to work on over the past two years.
Excerpts from Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright
1933, 1934 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1961, 1962
by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan. Reprinted with the permission of
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, and
David Higham Associates.
Gerald Murphy, Villa America © DACS, London/VAGA, New York.
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd vviiii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. A jailhouse photograph of Dorothy Ellingson published
on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle for Friday
16 January 1925, three days after she shot her mother. 38
Figure 2. Headlines and fi rst paragraph of one of the news reports
published in the international edition of the New York Herald
(29 March 1925). 40
Figure 3. Winter in Switzerland, poster by Erich Hermes, 1930. 54
Figure 4. St. Moritz, poster by Emil Cardinaux, 1921 56
Figure 5. The sign outside Sara and Gerald Murphy’s Villa
America, designed by Gerald Murphy. 146
TTeennddeerr__0000__PPrreelliimmss..iinndddd vviiiiii 1155//66//0077 1111::5533::3355
Introduction
William Blazek and Laura Rattray
After the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s landmark text of
American literary modernism, in April 1925, the reading public would
wait nine years for the appearance of the writer’s next novel, Tender Is the
Night, published on 12 April 1934.
Such a laboured birth of his fourth novel had never been the writer’s
original intention. In May 1925, only two weeks after the issue of Gatsby,
Fitzgerald had confi dently outlined ambitious (if vague) plans for the new
work to his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins: ‘The happiest thought I
have is of my new novel – it is something really NEW in form, idea, struc-
ture – the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for,
that Conrad didn’t fi nd’ (Kuehl and Bryer 104). In December of that year,
Fitzgerald assured Perkins: ‘My novel should be fi nished next fall’ (Kuehl
and Bryer 127). In April 1926, the writer instructed his literary agent: ‘The
novel is about one fourth done and will be delivered for possible serializa-
tion about January 1st. It will be about 75,000 words long, divided into 12
chapters, concerning tho this is absolutely confi dential such a case as that
girl who shot her mother on the Pacifi c coast last year. In other words, like
Gatsby it is highly sensational’ (Life in Letters 140–41).
Increasingly, however, Fitzgerald’s letters were peppered with anxious
references to the slow progress of the ‘new’ novel and with optimistic
estimates of the time required to complete future sections of the work.
On 11 August 1926, the author informed Perkins: ‘I’ll be home with the
fi nished manuscript of my book about mid-December’ (Kuehl and Bryer
144). By the end of November 1928, however, Perkins had received only
the fi rst two chapters from Fitzgerald. On 1 March 1929, having returned
to Europe from a visit to America – and without leaving further chapters
with his editor – Fitzgerald conceded: ‘A thousand thanks for your patience
– just trust me a few months longer, Max – it’s been a discouraging time
for me too but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve
never reproached me’ (Kuehl and Bryer 154).
In fact, another fi ve years would pass before the work that became
Tender Is the Night was published, ensuring that Fitzgerald’s fourth
novel off ers the most complex genesis of the writer’s oeuvre. Indeed, in
TTeennddeerr__0011__iinnttrroo..iinndddd 11 1155//66//0077 1111::5555::4499
2 Twenty-First-Century Readings of Tender Is the Night
its protracted development, it rivals the publishing history of almost
any modern American novel. There exist three manuscript versions and
seventeen drafts, all of which are further complicated by two versions of
the published novel and the added consideration of a possible plagiarized
early version of Scott Fitzgerald’s text in the case of Zelda Fitz gerald’s fi rst,
lost draft of her 1932 work Save Me the Waltz. For students of manuscript
and publishing history, the works-in-progress are preserved in the
research libraries at Princeton University with their unrivalled collection
of Fitzgerald’s papers. The 1990–91 publication of Fitzgerald’s manuscripts
in Matthew J. Bruccoli’s eighteen-volume edition has greatly enhanced
accessibility, alongside his earlier single-volume The Composition of Tender
Is the Night: A Study of the Manuscripts, fi rst published in 1963.
Though a number of incidents, episodes and character names survive
from the earliest draft (not least a drunken brawl that lands the protagonist
in a Roman jail), the novel published in 1934 was not the novel planned
in 1925. Called variously The World’s Fair, Our Type, The Boy Who Killed
His Mother, and The Melarky Case, the original ‘Francis Melarky version’
of the novel, on which Fitzgerald worked intermittently between 1925
and 1930, concerned a young American travelling in Europe who murders
his mother in a fi t of rage. Not least, then, the work that was originally
conceived around a plot of matricide would be transformed in Tender to
a novel featuring on many levels the death of a father. In 1929, Fitzgerald
briefl y abandoned the Melarky version in favour of the ‘Kelly version’,
involving a fi lm director, Lew Kelly, and his wife Nicole (who, on board
the ship transporting them to Europe, meet a seventeen-year-old actress
named Rosemary). In 1930, Fitzgerald returned to the matricide plot in his
sixth draft of the novel before work was dramatically interrupted by his
wife’s fi rst serious breakdown.
As has been well documented, Zelda’s physical and psychological
illness would leave her hospitalized for over a year, inevitably ensuring
that her husband had neither the fi nancial nor the mental luxury of
continuing work on a prolonged narrative. For a writer credited with
capturing an era, the timing of the couple’s diffi culties and personal illness
uncannily refl ected the wider social malaise, coinciding as it did with the
Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Under increasing fi nancial
pressure, Fitzgerald directed his creative energies at the commercial short
story market; the novel would have to wait.
It was when Fitzgerald fi nally returned to work on the novel in 1932
that he drafted a plan for the third version of the text which was the fi rst
to feature the character of Dick Diver. The working title, The Drunkard’s
Holiday, was altered to Doctor Diver’s Holiday and then to Tender Is the
TTeennddeerr__0011__iinnttrroo..iinndddd 22 1155//66//0077 1111::5555::5500