In Pieces

Finished Tender Is The Night finding much to enjoy in the final third. It still seems to me a novel of brilliant fragments even though there was more direction in the last part of the novel, dealing as it does with Dick Diver's decline. Even here there are obvious set pieces - like Dick getting sozzled and being beaten by the police and his rescue of Mary and her friend in the third or fourth last chapter. Cowley's informative notes make it clear that the latter episode only made it into the text just before publication and you could obviously leave it out without any damage at all to the story-line. But such episodes are strong enough in their own right to have kept me interested even though I had severe doubts about the central thesis of the novel.

I'm referring here to the business of what's wrong with Diver himself. The problem is that there's absolutely no reason why he should fall into his decline. This is at one with my problem in finding him even remotely credible as a psychoanalyst. He's just too dumb.

I think I can be a bit more specific about what goes wrong here, and my comments are based on an excellent book by Tom Dardis entitled The Thirsty Muse. Dardis is interested in the effects of alcohol, or rather alcoholism, upon Fitzgerald's generation of American writers. His thesis that the work of a number of them suffered deeply because of their drinking is extremely convincing, and the segment on Fitzgerald is particularly powerful (and sad.) Basically Diver's problem is a reflection of Fitzgerald's own - he's a drunk - but the writer can't bring himself to admit it's as simple as that. So it's clear Diver drinks too much but the implication is that this is the result of other, deeper, more complex problems. But it isn't. The addiction is the problem.

According to Dardis the same addiction wrecked the work of Faulkner, Hemingway and, of course, Fitzgerald. It's a simple but devastating idea and I think he's right.