Fitzgerald supported himself and his family in the late 1920s with his lucrative short-story output for slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, but he was haunted by his inability to progress on the novel. Around 1929 he tried a new angle on the material, starting over with a shipboard story about a Hollywood director Lew Kelly and his wife Nicole as well as a young actress named Rosemary. But Fitzgerald only completed two chapters of this version.
Zelda’s mental illness
By Spring 1929, the Fitzgeralds had returned to Europe when Zelda’s mental health deteriorated. During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car’s steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff. After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930. Zelda’s biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Oscar Forel’s contemporary psychiatric diagnosis:
“The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time that she is neither suffering from a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover.”
Seeking a cure for her mental illness, the couple traveled to Switzerland where Zelda underwent further treatment at a clinic. Zelda’s ingravescent mental illness and the death of Fitzgerald’s father in 1931 dispirited the author.
Devastated by these events, an alcoholic Fitzgerald settled in suburban Baltimore where he rented the La Paix estate from architect Bayard Turnbull. He decided the novel’s final plot would involve a young man of great potential who marries a mentally-ill woman and sinks into despair and alcoholism when their doomed marriage fails.
Final draft and publication
Fitzgerald wrote the final version of Tender Is the Night in 1932 and 1933. He salvaged almost everything he had written for the earlier Melarkey draft of the novel, as well as borrowed ideas and phrases from many short stories he had written in the years since completing The Great Gatsby.
Ultimately, he poured everything he had into Tender—his feelings regarding his wasted talent and self-perceived professional failure; his animosity towards his parents; his marriage to Zelda and her mental illness; his infatuation with actress Lois Moran, and Zelda’s affair with the French aviator Edouard Jozan.
Fitzgerald finished the work in the autumn of 1933, and it was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine over four parts from January to April 1934, leading up to its release on April 12, 1934. Although Edward Shenton provided illustrations for the serialization, he wasn’t responsible for the book’s jacket design, which was done by an unknown artist and not favored by Fitzgerald. The title of the novel was inspired by John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale”.
Critical reception
Fitzgerald deemed the novel to be his masterwork and believed it would eclipse the acclaim of his previous works. It was instead met with lukewarm sales and mixed reviews. One book review in The New York Times by critic J. Donald Adams was particularly harsh:
“Bad news is best blurted out at once: Tender Is the Night is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form…. His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.”
In contrast to the negative review in The New York Times, critic Burke Van Allen hailed the novel as a masterpiece in an April 1934 review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Besides Mr. Fitzgerald, no American novelist… has written four novels without a bad one, with a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life. Scott Fitzgerald grows, and his literature was born imposing… The variation of mood with which he has four times accomplished… is extraordinary.
The mood in This Side of Paradise was vindictive and rebellious; in The Beautiful and Damned sour and satirical; in Gatsby straightforward and tragic, inevitable, and in Tender Is the Night it is stained with a civilized and wounding brutality. It is necessary to say that I, the reviewer, have never used this severe word in print before: masterpiece.”
Three months after its publication, Tender Is the Night had sold only 12,000 copies compared to This Side of Paradise which sold over 50,000 copies. Despite a number of positive reviews, a consensus emerged that the novel’s Jazz Age setting and subject matter were both outdated and uninteresting to readers. The unexpected failure of the novel puzzled Fitzgerald for the remainder of his life.
Various hypotheses have arisen as to why the novel did not receive a warmer reception upon release. Fitzgerald’s friend, author Ernest Hemingway, opined that critics had initially only been interested in dissecting its weaknesses, rather than giving due credit to its merits.
He argued that such overly harsh criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and Depression-era America’s reaction to Fitzgerald’s status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess. In his later years, Hemingway re-read the work and remarked that, in retrospect, “Tender Is the Night gets better and better”.
Posthumous reevaluation
Following Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, Tender Is the Night’s critical reputation has steadily grown. Later critics have described it as “an exquisitely crafted piece of fiction” and “one of the greatest American novels”. It is now widely regarded as among Fitzgerald’s most accomplished works, with some agreeing with the author’s assessment that it surpasses The Great Gatsby.
Several critics have interpreted the novel to be a feminist work and posited that the patriarchal attitudes of the reactionary 1930s underlay the critical dismissal. They have noted the parallels between Dick Diver and Jay Gatsby, with many regarding the novel and particularly Diver’s character, as Fitzgerald’s most emotionally and psychologically complex work.
Christian Messenger argues that Fitzgerald’s book hinges on the sustaining sentimental fragments: “On an aesthetic level, Fitzgerald’s working through of sentiment’s broken premises and rhetoric in Tender heralds a triumph of modernism in his attempt to sustain his sentimental fragments and allegiances in new forms.” He calls it “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s richest novel, replete with vivid characters, gorgeous prose, and shocking scenes,” and calls attention to Slavoj Žižek’s use of the book to illustrate the nonlinear nature of experience.
Legacy and influence
In 1998, the Modern Library included the novel at #28 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Radcliffe later included it at #62 in its rival list. NPR included it at #69 on its 2009 list titled 100 Years, 100 Novels. In 2012 it was listed as one of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
Adaptations
In 1955, an hour long adaptation was broadcast live by CBS on the General Electric sponsored show “Front Row Center”, with Mercedes McCambridge as Nicole Diver. Dick Diver was played by James Daly. The telefilm was written by Whitfield Cook and directed and produced by McCambridge’s then-husband, Fletcher Markle. It featured original music by eminent composer David Raksin. New York Times reviewer John P. Shanley panned it as “an inept conception” and “an unforgivable treatment of a gifted author’s work.”
In 1962, a film adaptation was released with Jason Robards as Dick Diver and Jennifer Jones as Nicole Diver. The song “Tender Is the Night” from the movie soundtrack was nominated for the 1962 Academy Awards for Best Song.
Two decades later, in 1985, a television mini-series of the book was co-produced by the BBC, 20th Century Fox Television, and Showtime Entertainment. The mini-series featured Peter Strauss as Dick Diver, Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver, and Sean Young as Rosemary Hoyt.
In 1995, a stage adaptation by Simon Levy, with permission of the Fitzgerald Estate, was produced at The Fountain Theatre, Los Angeles. It won the PEN Literary Award in Drama and several other awards.
Boris Eifman’s 2015 ballet Up and Down is based loosely on the novel.
