Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities [1 ed.] 9780817387976, 9780817318536

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Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities

Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities Chris Messenger

T he Univer sit y of Al a­bama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Ala­bama Press Tuscaloosa, Ala­bama 35487–0380 uapress.ua.edu Copyright © 2015 by the University of Ala­bama Press All rights reserved. Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Ala­bama Press. Typeface: Garamond Manufactured in the United States of America Cover photograph: F. Scott Fitzgerald in France, c. 1930. F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers. Manuscript Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library. Fitzgerald Literary Trust. Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Cover design: Mary Elizabeth Watson ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of Ameri­can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Messenger, Christian K., 1943– author. Tender is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental identities / Chris Messenger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8173-1853-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8797-6 (e book) 1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Tender is the night. 2. Sentimentalism in literature. I. Title. PS3511.I9T4727 2014 813’.52—dc23 014021625

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

vii

ix

Introduction

1

Part I: Identities 1. “Rare,” “Whole-­Souled,” “Vicious”: Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment in Book One of Tender Is the Night 21 2. Replacing the Dead Sisters: Fitzgerald’s Narrative Incorporations of Sentimental Mourning 42 3. “So Easy To Be Loved—So Hard To Love”: Sentiment, Charm, and Carrying the Egos 60 Part II: Refractions 4. Sentiment and the Construction of ­Nicole Warren Diver

83

5. Ophelia, ­Zelda, and the Women of Tender Is the Night 104 6. The Uncanny in Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Imagination

127

Part III: Influences 7. “The Q ueen Moon Is On Her Throne”: Fitzgerald’s Maternal Hero “Plagued By” Keats and Florence Nightingale 149 8. “How Many Women Is Power”: Dickens’ Sarah Gamp and Ventriloquizing the Sentimental 168

vi / Contents 9. Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy: Sentiment, Sensation, and “Two Faces” 187 Conclusion Notes

210 219

Works Cited Index

253

265

Illustrations

1. A Chorus Line of Fitzgeralds, Paris, Christmas 1925

26

2. Scott dubbed this 1920 photo “Cruise of the Rolling Junk”

95

3. Scott and Z ­ elda grimly arrive at a formal function, Baltimore, 1931

123

Preface

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s created world remains seductive and powerful almost a century after his prose first charmed and beguiled Ameri­can readers. As a young researcher walking the Princeton campus one warm summer night decades ago, I had This Side of Paradise in hand. Amory Blaine was my guide, careening from romantic crush to new idea, intoxicated with self, a bit foolish and always hopeful. To this day, I find the photo of Hobey Baker, the impossibly blond and handsome Princeton fullback of 1914, to be an ideal of Fitzgerald’s mind and heart and my secret Dick Diver. By the early 1930s, with his life and novelist’s career in disarray, Scott Fitzgerald made a final attempt to shape the narrative that became Tender Is the Night, a masterpiece that united in a deeply sentimental text the young romantic with his older counterpart, the beleaguered writer and husband. My study here began as part of a more comprehensive project on “Male Sentiment in Modern Ameri­can Fiction” but as Tender became the text that just kept on giving, I found it yielded more insight on the curve of Fitzgerald’s entire career and dictated that I stay in the novel’s force field until I found out everything I could. Coming full circle as a Fitzgerald reader, I tried to imagine myself as film producer Monroe Stahr in The Love of the Last Tycoon, furiously beating his wings like Icarus near the sun “stay[ing] up there longer than most of us” before “settl[ing] gradually to earth” in Hollywood—a Prometheus come to define and be with America—again in Fitzgerald’s warm darkness, where I had found my place in his audience. Fitzgerald’s androgynous sensibility captivated me well before I knew how to spell or use “androgynous” in critique. As a young reader of Tender, I was al-

x / Preface

ways ­Nicole Warren, Rosemary Hoyt, and Dick Diver and felt no essential contradiction. How fitting to finally realize in the Dick Diver Manuscripts, the ease with which Fitzgerald alchemically crafted a movie starlet from the angry young man of the Melarky drafts. His quicksilver sensibility flashed insights from a gendered versatility that was always provocative, sensuous, and beautiful. In understanding Fitzgerald, I owe a great debt of thanks to a generation of University of ­Illinois at Chicago graduate and undergraduate students who have been my willing (if not always sentimental) accomplices through many readings of Tender Is the Night under the sign of successive criti­cal enthusiasms. I hope our inquiry always stopped short of the forensic and enriched the living novel for them as they did my sense of its importance in Fitzgerald’s career. In particular, I cite Alex Wulff, Elsa Mitsoglou, and Cynthia Barounis, each of whom at stages of this project’s life, suggested concepts that sent me on a more capacious errand of discovery. Thanks as well to Dan Waterman at the University of Ala­bama Press who took a chance on that dreaded contemporary beast—the single author, single text criti­ cal book—and allowed me to roam freely until done, but rightly insisted I slash the text to manageable length and present a better study that is still slightly shorter than Tender Is the Night. Thanks as well to my helpful and enthusiastic editor Jon Berry at Ala­bama, as well as to my estimable copy editor, Kevin Fitzgerald; Scott and myself are fortunate to have such a doppelganger. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society took me in over a decade ago with a warm greeting for a fellow acolyte and definitely pushed me to a wider and deeper sense of Fitzgerald’s meaning, readerly community, and scholarship. The Society also knows how to throw an elegant conference or two in grand locales, and I believe Scott would certainly approve of our venues and adventures here and abroad. Thanks to stalwarts of Fitzgerald study who encouraged and then read my work: Ruth Prigozy, Bill Blazek, Scott Donaldson, the wise, droll Jackson Bryer, and the polymath, ever-­cool Kirk Curnutt. They’ve been guides and friends whose enthusiasm for and writing on Fitzgerald I always hope to emulate. Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night has so many passages cloaked in rare beauty. Before we begin to interpret, deconstruct, and re-­construct, I must cite the master for memorable lines, of­ten casually buried in gorgeous paragraphs that unscroll to make this novel almost unsurpassed in deep reading pleasure. If by the middle of this book, an intent reader may want to indict me for slighting the music and synesthetic feast of Fitzgerald’s prose in favor of interpretation, please allow me a sample and mea culpa here. Fitzgerald of­ten saved his own best lines in his Notebooks for incorporation into his fiction and knew himself to be a memorable and vivid sentence maker. His settings were quick slashes of color, both heat and light. Of the sea and beach,

Preface / xi

he wrote, “fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade, a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive” (Tender 4). In the Paris night, “lovers now they fell ravenously on the quick sec­onds while outside the taxi windows the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-­red, gas-­blue, ghost-­green signs began to shine s­ mokily through the tranquil rain” (74). A Swiss ski lift came alive as “Dorothy Perkins roses dragged patiently through each compartment slowly waggling with the motion of the funicular, letting go at the last to swing back to their rosy cluster. Again and again these branches went through the car” (148). Fitzgerald was also the laureate of both male charm and female beauty. Dick Diver came “with his arms full of the slack he had taken up from others, deeply merged in his own party” (33) and “without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-­inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done” (28). ­Nicole Diver’s “once fair hair had darkened, but she was lovelier now at twenty-­four than she had been at eighteen, when her hair was brighter than she,” (25) and “Her face, the face of a saint, a Viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight” (33). Dick and ­Nicole together: “the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world” (134). The delicacy of romantic encounter between Dick and Rosemary: “when she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like bird’s wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her,” (68) and “They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs” (74). Finally, for wisdom to guide this study, Fitzgerald observed, “if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them” (178)—“simply because no one nature can extend entirely inside another” (280). With these cautionary observations from Tender Is the Night applied to reading anyone’s life and work to satisfaction, it’s time to begin.

Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities

Introduction We have spirited emotions, and we have tender ones. When the latter increases to the level [i.e., strength] of an affect, they are utterly useless; and a propensity toward them is called sentimentality. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

The sentimental in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night is the focus of this book. For that reason it is fitting and also somewhat sobering to begin with Kant’s negative assessment above. For Kant, a propensity toward a “tender” emotion is sentimentality, and thus “tender” is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sentiment may be beautiful or sensible to Kant, but it is always weaker, as Kant believes sentimentality to be “a sympathetic grief that refuses to be consoled” (133). In Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver’s conclusion about the effect of his charm on other people. is as follows: “So easy to be loved—so hard to love” (Tender 245). Kant continues his analy­sis of sentimentality with the view that beauty is incompatible with romances, maudlin plays, and so-­called noble attitudes that “make the heart languid” (133). He concludes that grief—if it is based on sympathy—may indeed be lovable “but belongs merely to the languid affects” (137). So nominally “easy,” then, for Dick Diver as an Ameri­can who “wanted to be good, wanted to be kind” and wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in” (133). For Fitzgerald these charactertistics of Diver were more “illusions of a[n Ameri­can] nation” (117); as such, they function as a bolder and more rueful version of Gatsby’s famous schedule, now ascribed to a sophisticated Ameri­can psychoanalyst with the weight of modernity and his patient-­wife’s recovery squarely on his shoulders. For Kant, Fitzgerald’s beautiful romance would be discounted into an already diminished regimen on behalf of a naïve and sentimental errand. Yet the manner in which Fitzgerald negotiates issues of morals and aesthetics as well as sympathy and beauty rests on his career-­long affair with sentiment and its more discredited sibling, sentimentality.

2 / Introduction

What follows in this book is not an introduction, a casebook, or a fictional text chosen to exemplify a criti­cal theory or ideo­logi­cal presumption. Rather, it is an argument that Tender Is the Night is a Fitzgerald masterwork that is key to his body of fiction. I believe that sentiment through its many guises is both a cultural formation and a temperamental imperative that helps unlock both Fitzgerald’s major novel and career. I formulate a number of eclectic positions on the novel’s genesis, influences, and composition by evaluating Fitzgerald’s running love affair and quarrel with sentiment as he both positively and negatively represented his imagination and sensibility to readers and to himself. Fitzgerald in his work was deeply influenced, both personally and aesthetically, by the sensibility Keats phrased as “Negative Capability,” the paradox of “being in uncertainties.”1 This state of feeling sustained Fitzgerald’s fiction and also drove him to excesses that he felt pandered to popu­lar taste. Fitzgerald was shaped by these different impulses and thus committed himself to expressing them without coming to any resolution via his imagination. Fitzgerald did not presume to unravel Keats’ famous equilibration of “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” but by taking his title for Tender Is the Night from “Ode to a Nightingale” he acknowledged the power of Keats’ lines and also the aesthetic and intellectual positions that allowed him famously, as he wrote in 1936, “to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” which he deemed to be “the test of a first-­rate intelligence” (“The Crack-­Up” 69). Tender Is the Night (1934) is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s richest novel, replete with vivid characters, gorgeous prose, and shocking scenes. The architecture of its plot and thematics is formidable and ambitious, its technical experimentation under­ valued. Long consigned to sec­ond behind The Great Gatsby (1925) in criti­cal estimates, Tender may be seen as Fitzgerald’s most complex and powerful fiction, conceived by a mature writer over a decade defined by the tragedy of his wife’s illness and their battle over art and personal survival. Kirk Curnutt disputes the conclusion that Tender’s “experimental qualities” are more a byproduct of its “troubled textual history.” He concludes that Fitzgerald finally settled on a “startling juxtaposition” of “omniscient and modernist narrative styles” that were “wholly unique,” and that his “polished” style and “an unconventional off-­kilter approach to its subject” were actually the strengths of his major modernist novel (“A Unity” 124, 140). Curnutt notes that Fitzgerald could only complete his fiction “when compelled by its personal significance.” As proof he quotes Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author” (1936), where Fitzgerald writes: “I must start out with an emotion . . . one that’s close to me and that I can understand” (Cambridge Introduction 40). An emotion that’s “close” is necessarily narcissistic and privatized; Fitzgerald knew, not without misgivings, that he was captivated by such self-­scrutiny. Neither modifier—emotion that is personal and understood—is

Introduction / 3

conducive to Fitzgerald’s reputation as an experimental or challenging modernist in an era of fictional giants who were more impersonal and enigmatic. Curnutt cites Matthew Bruccoli to the effect that Fitzgerald was “endlessly patient about trying to make a sentence more graceful or striking.” The charge of “diffuseness” directed at Tender’s narration is actually a modernist aim that Curnutt sees as one Fitzgerald shared with Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway in which literature’s “proper concern was consciousness and character. Like those peers, Fitzgerald considered unity a matter of atmosphere, not story logic” (46). In a May 1, 1925, letter to Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald grandiosely announced his “current” novel project: “The happiest thought I have is of my new novel—it is something really NEW in form, idea, and structure—the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find” (A Life in Letters 108). To H. L. Mencken on May 4, 1925, he wrote, “[the new novel is] about myself— not what I thought of myself in This Side of Paradise. Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented” (111). Fitzgerald not only announced a major formal ambition but also stated this novel would be firmly about Scott Fitzgerald. Thus his problem as a modernist was posed: how could he work through his fictional problems in significant form if he wasn’t an ironist, satirist, or mandarin experimentalist? As both a romantic and a sentimentalist, Fitzgerald was working from two discredited strains in literary modernism and yet became a significant modern writer by consistently interrogating them even as he exemplified their precepts. In contrast to many of his Olympian modernist peers who more readily derided sentiment, he knew—not without continual anxiety—that he flew on its broken wings. Sentiment powerfully aided his narrative conversion of the intensities of affect through aesthetic representation.2 No Ameri­can male author or novel since Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night has told us as much about sentiment’s strengths and failings in authorizing affective narratives for modern Ameri­can fiction. Indeed the word “tender” itself has multiple associations that Fitzgerald deploys to the fullest. Dick Diver “tenders” sympathy as a sentimentalist; he is solicitous, protective, and charming. He is hired on a “big case” as husband and doctor, and his concern is both “tender” and professional: in effect Dick is a tender who “tenders tenderness” itself to a life partner and in a legal and financial transaction between himself and the Warrens. Finally, he “tenders” his resignation to ­Nicole, the Warrens, and his profession as caretaker and romantic hero in effect to “fade away” and “dissolve” into a Keatsian night in America. Fitzgerald’s prose is repeatedly a delicate gossamer web tendering the material world in rare beauty. His romances float through the sensorium in which we receive and order their affects, which may be both sensitive and painful—in short, tender. “Tender” as an inclu-

4 / Introduction

sive trope is thus thoroughly imbricated by Fitzgerald through both commercial and romantic discourse in the novel. For Fitzgerald, the hard fact of legal and financial “tender” clashes with “tender’s” affective softness; he is always vested in the tension that such oxymorons create in his narrative. His characters are continually in complex sentimental relation to and through “tender” itself. Fitzgerald was captivated by sentiment used in the service of creating an interior life for his characters. Sentiment allowed them primary knowledge about themselves and their world while also enabling them to test the validity of their responses in the edifice they constructed for cognition through the passions. 3 David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) initially played the most important role in making the psychology of in­di­vidual sensation challenge more traditional philosophical systems as a main avenue for determining truth and value. Hume focused on epistemological problems and in­di­vidual sensations as the only reliable source of ascertainable truth (Watt, “Impressionism and Symbol­ ism” 244). Hume’s empiricist stance authorized a powerful brief for sentiment’s significance, in which sentiment produces an idea that in turn creates an impression and a “complex sentiment that is at once full of content and fundamentally a part of the mind” (Townsend 106). Annette Baier stresses that Book II of Hume’s Treatise Concerning Human Understanding (1739–40) “looks at first-person singular self-­evaluation,” “at our capacity for sympathy with another’s ­evaluations— [that] all prepare us for the first-­person plural reflexivity that morality involves” (Baier 134). For Hume, sympathy was a “moral sentiment” that we then extend outward to an object, a victim, or a situation. Yet much of the modern reaction against sentiment has cohered around notions that the sympathetic spectator is also capable of being cast as a fetishist and voyeur in the pursuit of visual pleasure (Hinton 2).4 The full application of a Freudian-­Lacanian skepticism and its explanatory rhetoric has been the most sophisticated armature in the critique of sentiment by powerful contemporary criti­cal rhetoric, such as that which informs gender studies and queer theory in the seminal work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. Sentiment is frequently portrayed as an errant governor on the passions that underscores the coercion and manipulation of feeling. Fitzgerald knew how deeply he was caught in these conundrums about sentiment. In Tender he wades in with a psychiatrist hero who is also the husband of a paternal incest victim and mounts controlling sentimental performances. Dick Diver “wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult” (133). He is thus a naïve and sentimental collage of an Ameri­can, his Gatsbyesque schedule expressing so many of sentiment’s facets in a hostile modernity. Fitzgerald is always compelling on the subject of sentiment, trying to “fit it in” as it relates to his fictional juggling between high romance and realism. Fitzgerald through his author’s intensities was able to call up

Introduction / 5

“the intimate wedding of disparate subjects (psychoanaly­sis and literature), by a distinctive operation of the transfer of the implications” (Brooks Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling 39). I’ve always been committed as a critic to place different systems within a structural congruence as well as in sets of relations transacted in a middle range. Such is my focus whether I’m dealing with classic realism, the “play between” posited in my earlier work on sport and play in Ameri­can fiction, or the criti­cal play between articulating criti­cal positions on popu­lar and elite fiction. Fitzgerald is in that “gap,” playing sentiment; he cannot write without its pressure. In Tender’s phenomenology, sentiment is made up of interpretive, absorptive, and desiring views, structures of feeling that determine our investiture. Fitzgerald had to see himself reflected in eyes reflected back at him; he had to stamp his characters vividly with himself in order for them and for him to exist. Thus Dick Diver is in a parallax gap saving and needing to be saved as husband, analyst, and author (Fitzgerald). Slavoj Žižek writes, “I myself am included into the picture constituted by me.” A similar attitude is a fundamental fictional belief of Fitzgerald’s, bequeathed to Dick Diver; it is also a key example of sentiment re-­sentimentalized at its most comprehensive. We wish to save, seduce, become, and “identify with” what Lacan calls “the object cause of desire” (PV 17).

Parallax and Sentiment When Žižek cites the two published versions of Tender Is the Night (1934, 1951) as his first extended example of parallax in The Parallax View, he is acknowledg­ ing the layers and mirrors of a tale and that to present Dick Diver’s “sad fate” in “the mode of a linear narrative is a lie, an ideo­logi­cal mystification.” Žižek believes the two versions are not consecutive but rather they should be read structurally, synchronously, for parallax at its purest is “the gap between two versions and irreducible, it is the ‘truth’ of both of them” (19).5 In framing parallax as his major trope, Žižek notes “the non self-­coincidence of Being,” and “the minimal difference which sustains the parallax gap” (PV 167). Žižek relentlessly finds spatial and formal evidence for his “gap” in Hegel’s “phenomenal” consciousness, the self-­conscious “I” of Lacan, Freud, and Kant, cognitive brain science, Einstein’s relativity and “curved space,” quantum physics’ stress on the “outcome of observation,” and Heidegger’s intimations of being in the world. Sentiment, then, may become a bridge or a relational transaction within the gap that creates through relation and transference. Parallax is a quintessential example of the redoubling of self standing outside and inside any picture, projecting self into another and absorbing the vision with a clearly intimate relational self; this is what Žižek calls “the focus of [his] libidinal investment” (18).6 Fitzgerald imaginatively grasped

6 / Introduction

the essential truth of reality’s refraction through parallax. He also intuited the vertiginous violation of projected parallax selves expressed in Dick Diver’s “agony,” that he and ­Nicole could never truly live within one another and “become one and equal” (Tender 190). Sentiment is that kernel in the gap refracted by parallax, as in the way that charm repeatedly saves Dick Diver. For Fitzgerald, the major moments in Tender were manifestations of the crisis of sentiment laced with seduction in the management of trauma within the collective rhetorics of psychoanaly­sis and the culture products of Hollywood. At the same time, the personal origin of Fitzgerald’s sentimental “form” in Tender is in the twinned narratives of the death of the two Fitzgerald baby sisters prior to Scott Fitzgerald’s birth (see Chapter 2) and the ongoing crisis of Z ­ elda’s institutionalization and writing (see Chapter 5) overlaid and read “synchronously.” When Žižek comments that “‘reality’ itself is ultimately nothing but a (self-­) split of appearance” (PV 173), he could be describing the complete sentimental curve of so many of Dick Diver’s interpretations of his experience.7 What Žižek simply calls “being human” is “grounded . . . between cognitive and emotional facilities,” where “every understanding is a contingent projecting of a link over a gap” (228, 273). Sentimental and romantic commitments that begin emotionally are formed into what Brian Massumi, writing on affect, labels “semantically and semiotically formed progressions,” where “intensity is owned and recognized” (28). Sentiment is the narrativized conventional vehicle for transforming emotional affect into meaning circuits along a refracted parallax loop of seeing self in the other, with all inevitable manifestations.8 Laura Hinton adds a “binocular parallax” when she describes “the human capacity under most conditions to synthesize retinal disparity into a single unitary image,” which leads to “the appearance of a singular image in a multiple-­plane reference” (104, 107). This paradox of vision extends also to the disparity between the reader and spectator-­in-­the-­other. Such a construction yields a unitary image that synthesizes self only in the other: this is the sentimental parallax that is a fundament of sympathy inherent in a human identification or representation. As a sentimental reader of a sentimental author, I wish to implicate Fitzgerald and my criti­cal act in what he is caught in. I want to give Tender Is the Night a more human and humane face while at the same time I wish to think of Fitzgerald as the most talented and self-­conscious male sentimentalist in Ameri­can modernism. Reading from my parallax gap makes me sympathetic to his problems and gives me a sentimental identification with his charm. Finally, to metacriti­ cally stand disenchanted outside Fitzgerald’s sentimental thrall is also a necessity for me as it was for Fitzgerald who always measured the refracted sensibility of Dick Diver.

Introduction / 7

Sentiment and Sentimentality A slippage of terms surrounds any discussion of the sentimental. I will only sketch the dimensions of this problem for Fitzgerald before beginning in earnest a study of Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald understood both the collective sentimentality coded as nostalgia and the sentimental personal definition of self that constitutes our in­di­vidual nature, which is what each in­di­vidual creates as his or her own emotional imaginary. From early school days, Fitzgerald was analyzing his assets and liabilities in lists and ledgers to gauge what, as Nick says about Gatsby, “a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (97). We arrange our sentimentalities according to the needs of the ego and then “feel” them; our heart “goes out,” most fundamentally to ourselves. Freud in “The Uncanny” offers a sketch of the psychology of a fiction in which author and reader invest their attention in a “‘hero who is the centre of interest,’ showing the ‘tell-­tale invulnerability’ of ‘his Majesty the Ego, the hero of every daydream and novel’” (Freud, “The Uncanny” xxiii). In Tender, “Sentiment as nostalgia” would include key scenes from childhood and family, an archetypal romance with “the girl,” and fixations, however displaced by Fitzgerald, with repeated visions of being both mother and father. Dick Diver finally shapes his desires through sentiment only to become disillusioned and believe his forms are largely empty. The “whole new world” has blown up as surely as his “safe, lovely world” did on the World War I battlefield. Fitzgerald is never ironic or hip (“I couldn’t kid here”) as he attempts to deal with his emotional wellsprings (56–59). One has to be careful not to graft a postmodern view of male sentiment onto Fitzgerald, a post-­Pynchon “keep cool but care” ethic of the 1960s and ’70s, which in essence is a valorization of a male compromise where the author is allowed to show feeling while retaining a masculine “toughness” no matter how intelligent. Sentiment becomes a more self-­reflexive way past the bleak courage of existential embrace. Fitzgerald’s earnest allegiance was rather to sentiment’s traditional forms and excesses. He was sentimentally invested in charm and the depiction of beauty; thus he was at a disadvantage when it came to establishing himself as a skeptical modernist. Fitzgerald sensed this problem within his talent and prose. His task was to repeatedly scrutinize his scenes, testing their veracity as valid sentimental moments against the pull of vari­ous technes that dissolve scenes into what might be devalued through the label “sentimentality.” When does feeling or sentiment shade over into sentimentality, and how does Fitzgerald mediate the difference through romance? If sentiment is the overall emotional import of a passage, sentimentality is seen to be the extreme attempt to be affective, to (melo)dramatically move the reader or viewer beyond the facts of the scene swiftly and surely

8 / Introduction

to feeling and identification. At what point sentiment is deemed sentimentality is a subjective matter of taste itself, determined by each author and reader in the cultural milieu. Sentimentality generally provides the expected reaction in a sure overkill of marshaled resources in narrative. A depiction through sentiment will cover heightened emotional ground and enter a territory that is not predetermined, out of the heart of a scene’s truth; the heart extended to one person is a trope generally sentimentalized as “true” sentiment. The more general “trick of the heart” is always felt by Dick Diver to be coercion through language; each time he calls his emotion a “trick’ (164, 216), he is disparaging his own power by in effect calling it sentimentality. Sentiment is the emotion while sentimentality is pejoratively considered to stimulate, indulge, and wallow in the emotion, showing no confidence in the emotion itself. Sentiment is seen to directly communicate while sentimentality entertains “a distorted perception of an object for the sake of a desired emotional experience” (Pugmire 128). Sentiment punctuates emotional moments while sentimentality manipulates them, though how we employ the verbs “punctuate” and “manipulate” is always in considerable dispute. Fitzgerald is relentless in deploying emotion and the beauty of its language to carry scenes; however he could not help be caught in repeated questioning of his own effects, as to their honesty, valence, and power. He could not always find a way to eliminate sentimentality in favor of sentiment, since he knew himself formed by strands of both, even as they were inherent in each other and in the modern culture he depicted in his work.9 In Tender, Fitzgerald is always struck by what he deems sentiment’s “harlotry” (69) but also by “rare sentiment” (34), the more pejorative “carnivals of affection” (27) and the fervent “heart going out” (183). He wrote to producer Lester Cowan in June of 1940 that he would hold out against any sentimentality but “no one is more responsive than I am to true sentiment” (Turnbull, Letters 602). To illustrate this view, in August 1940, he attached an author’s note to his screenplay adaptation of his story, “Babylon Revisited,” that sharply differentiates sentiment and sentimentality: “This is an attempt to tell a story from a child’s point of view without sentimentality. Any attempt to heighten the sentiment of the early scenes by putting mawkish speeches into the mouth of characters—in short by doing what is locally known as ‘milking it,’ will damage the force of the piece. Had the present author intended, he could have broken down the sentimental section of the audience at many points, but the price would have been the release of the audience too quickly from tension—and one would wonder at the end where the idea had vanished—or indeed what idea had been purchased” (Bruccoli, The Price Was High 485). Fitzgerald could most of­ten coolly appraise his own effects while creating them. Sentiment vividly existed for him as an exquisite honesty, but he felt

Introduction / 9

to heighten it through the coercion of sentimentality would be to lose what he deems the truest valence of emotion in the writing. In Fitzgerald’s fiction, most centrally in Tender Is the Night, “true” sentiment is “rare,” whereas sentimentality is akin to “vicious” manipulation. However, it is a truth acknowledged that perhaps all writers work on the edge of sentimentality and the most lauded in literary modernism in part were those deemed to have avoided falling into it. Fitzgerald is acutely aware of the “tensile strength” of Dick’s balance, in which Dick says, “smart men play close to the line because they have to” (99). An author may be especially self-­conscious about his characters and their sentimental currency when that “line” is between a culturally approved sentiment and an in­di­vidual romantic choice. Deeply subjective, sentiment appears to validate precisely what Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Hume conceived: that it’s lodged deep within our emotional responses and beliefs as to what will capture our sympathies and affiliations and thus underwrite our reason.10 Sentimentality is arguably broader and “easier” than sentiment; sentimentality appeals to a mass audience through the effect of hyperbole and melodrama, which is why modern propaganda from all ideologies strives for its base notes. Finally, sentiment is a cornerstone of postmodern identity politics, which has become the current site for what sentiment and sentimentality are and do in both fiction and criticism; this is the contested literary and cultural climate in which this study of Scott Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night is undertaken.

Tender’s Office: Sentiment, Seduction, Analysis Fitzgerald’s heroes are never the ironic inward male fig­ures of Hawthorne, the metaphysical questers of Melville, the isolates of Hemingway, or Faulknerian South­erners obsessed with race, history, and innocence. He has no male initiations into blood, no “great beast,” no boy hunters to instruct or their genealogical fathers to narrate the elegies. His heroes are consistently relational to other men and women, almost without existence except as perceived by or refracted in another person’s gaze or consciousness. Glenn Hendler comments that a novel “in its very nature, [is] after all, an invasion of privacy, a fictionally intimate sphere that is constituted by its reading public’s desire to violate and penetrate that intimacy” (176). Hendler’s example of the novel is also symptomatic of a contemporary literary criticism that is never more intimate than when it contemplates the ravishing of a text. For example, Sedgwick writes martially about the “ballistics” of the sentimental and the “targeted embodiment of sentimentality” (222). Such powerful criti­cal language dictates that the sentimental respondent (author, character, or reader) is at once relational and invasive of the other in a form of sympathy that is also a violent seduction. Sentiment’s desiring and sympathetic

10 / Introduction

lines of intent most completely describe the personal and authorial dynamics of Scott Fitzgerald as well as the fraught line of intent between author and reader. A sentimental training through fiction occurs through writing and reading as we constantly imagine and rehearse lifeworld emotions. Pierre Bourdieu believes that in Flaubert’s landmark Sentimental Education (1869) “the sentimental education of Frederic Moreau is his education by sentiment” (The Rules of Art 38). In Tender, Dick Diver’s sentimental education through affect begins in love affairs with ­Nicole and Rosemary and in his ambition to be the best young psychiatrist in Europe; his final sentimental education occurs in the “broken universe” in which he carries egos of those “early met and loved” (Tender 245). A familiar Bourdieuian (and Bakhtinian) criti­cal move is to “situate” a Flaubert “at the geometric intersection of all perspectives . . . [where] he forces himself in some fashion to raise to their highest intensity the set of questions posed in the field, to play out all resources inscribed in the space of possibles” (The Rules of Art 100). Fitzgerald strives mightily to achieve such intensity in Dick’s wide-­ranging intimations on the world he initially controls and fashions. Flaubert’s novel for Bourdieu is “inscribed at the intersection of the romantic and realist traditions” (100), a chronotope where the sentimental must reside and where Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night achieves its triumphs. James Chandler comprehensively describes this motion of sentiment’s “geometry,” which he states, “lie[s] in the way in which the horizontal field of mutually reflective relationships is compounded by a vertical structure of reflexive levels. The resulting scheme is thus at once a circuit of reflections and an ascending scale of reflexivity” (xviii–xix). He concludes that “the sentimental is a mode or mood defined not by a simplistic form of sincerity but rather by a complex form of modernity” (15). These levels of association and motion are most germane to Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night where a recurring trope—“Routes Crossing”—defines character relations and their abstractions lodged within the powerful range of the sentimental. On an aesthetic level, Fitzgerald’s working through of sentiment’s premises and forms in Tender heralds a triumph of modernism and the attempt to shore up sentimental fragments in new configurations. Dick Diver is precisely the sentimental man in crisis; as such he can be viewed as a “dandy,” a fig­ure in Ameri­can fiction described by Hendler as a sentimental character who embodies a tension between a masculinity in pub­lic performance and one that is more affective and personal (152–55, 162). Foucault in “What is Enlightenment” comments that the will of modernity is “to ‘heroize’ the present” and that “the deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern . . . is to take oneself as the subject of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme” (310–11). In a critique of sympathy as well as that of seduction, there are no longer any boundaries among bodies,

Introduction / 11

wants, and needs and this creates a conceptual chaos in both sentiment and romance. Dick Diver has a doctor’s professional sympathy as well as a spectatorial “scopohilia”; he is also a seducer with a director’s eye for mounting a production and controlling performance in which, in multiple contiguous roles, he “saves” and colonizes and becomes. In order to fully develop the sentimental in Tender Is the Night through his doctor and patient, Fitzgerald needed to draw on the symbiosis between psychoanaly­ sis and literature. Psychoanaly­sis is imperialistic, states Peter Brooks, who allows it should be both textual and rhetorical in its attempt to establish a pragmatic (Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling 7, 22–23); sentiment, too, in its recording gaze both sees and appropriates according to a felt emotional reaction. It is also parallactic as it relies on the empathetic transaction of seeing yourself in the analyst’s tale, in both transference and counter-­transference. Psychoanaly­sis thrives on the humanity of narrativized emotion, as the sentimental story may be resentimentalized through analy­sis and reading. The interpersonal transaction is spatial as it curves human response between analyst and analysand, but it is also temporal as it retrieves deep memory within structures of grief and mourning. Analysis occurs in a provisional present that attempts to structure the past so that it can bear the future. The story that the analysand and the reader can both stand and learn from is a sentimental construction in the gap, born in the complex extension of sympathy. Tender Is the Night is thus comprised of multiple chronologies that must be read synchronically by the critic-­reader while existing in the time of the text. There is Fitzgerald’s biographical “time” (childhood, marriage, Z ­ elda Fitzgerald’s illness, and the writer’s vocation), Dick Diver’s time, and the time of the Diver marriage; there is also Tender time as it arranges chronological “Diver time” in the novel and the time of the two versions—1934, 1938/1951—not to mention the eighteen drafts of the novel dating back to the Melarky Manuscript in the late1920s. Perhaps Tender was never actually “finished” since it was the ongoing emotional narrative of Scott Fitzgerald from early childhood identifications through the early 1930s and the Fitzgeralds’ disintegrating marriage.11 “Writing ­Nicole Warren Diver” was finally the way to continue the Tender manuscripts with the outlines of ­Zelda’s madness after Scott’s block in continuing the earlier Francis Melarky material. Tender Is the Night did almost miraculously regenerate itself through Fitzgerald’s sentimental form to manage the content of the two dead Fitzgerald sisters as well as the anguish of Z ­ elda Fitzgerald. Reading is most fundamentally the transference Fitzgerald sensed; thus Tender is his most affective fiction, in which he is exposed as protagonist. ­Nicole’s treatment, a precipitate of ­Zelda’s condition, is always in transition in the novel, while the death of the two infant Fitzgerald sisters is always part of the construction. What is in re-

12 / Introduction

vision for the better part of a decade is Tender Is the Night itself—an heroic biographical and narratological battle with and through sentiment.

Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Prologues to Tender Is the Night When the courting Amory Blaine and Eleanor play up their intellects in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory calls sex “a rather unpleasant force that’s part of the machinery under everything.” He then “paused and tried to get a metaphor”: “You see everyone’s got to have some cloak to throw around [sex]. The mediocre intellects, Plato’s sec­ond class, use the remnants of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment” (238). Here a young Fitzgerald comments with shrewd mock-­disillusionment about his own style. He possesses clarity about what shores him up when he writes, as he pokes in the ruins of genteel passion through poor Amory, whose request for a kiss from Eleanor is rebuffed. Amory has protested twice to Rosalind that he is romantic and not sentimental. Rosalind says she “want[s] sentiment, real sentiment—and [she] never find[s] it,” but Amory retorts “I never find anything else in the world—and I loathe it” (185). When Amory concludes the novel by proclaiming, “I know myself, but that is all” (282), Fitzgerald has ironically brought the reader to the landmark sentimental opening of Rousseau’s Confessions. During 1932 to 1934, Fitzgerald, the self-­described “old romantic” (58), becomes more interested in exemplifying vari­ous grades of sentiment through Dick Diver and scenes in Tender Is the Night than through speeches from the brittle young who juggles concepts in Paradise. Fitzgerald had written there that “the sentimental person thinks things will last” while “the romantic person hopes against hope they won’t” (177) and has “desperate confidence they won’t last” (229). He labeled sentiment as “spiritual rouge” (239) and declared that sentimentalists desire a “pure simple state” (258). In Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert go to a cabaret on Broadway where “gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people” of lesser occupations . . . most of all, clerks” who come with “their pathetically pretentious women.” The shock to Anthony comes when Gloria says she absolutely loves the scene. Without her lavish “seeing,” it would remain gaudy and deficient, but now Anthony sees the scene as a backdrop to his infatuation with her: “At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-­tingle, and filled his throat with husky and vibrant emotion” (71). Like Rosemary triumphing for the audience in Daddy’s Girl, Anthony’s heart goes out to Gloria. The cheap, imitative room falls away for Anthony who is satirized in his romantic crush by the instability of his sentimental reactions: Gloria loves the room and is the room. Then, as in the conclusion of the Diver party scene in Tender (34), “the illusion

Introduction / 13

snapped like a nest of threads” (The Beautiful and Damned 72). Gloria pushes her response even further as she says, “I belong here. I’m like these people,” which to an even more stunned Anthony, “seemed a sardonic paradox.” Gloria continues his sentimental education: “No, I’m not. I am like them. . . . You ought to see. . . . You don’t know me.” She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on his, as though surprised at the last to see him there. “I’ve got a streak of what you’d call cheapness. I don’t know where I get it but it’s—oh, things like this and bright colors and vulgarity. I seem to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I’m this because of this and that because of that” (72–73). Fitzgerald allows Gloria as mythologist to shrewdly gauge the levels of her audience response, from romantic object to object of analy­sis and critique.12 The stamp of her “cheapness” is deep in her—she accepts it. Gloria is a spokesperson for Fitzgerald as a hard-­bitten observer of his own complex talent and relation to sentiment while Anthony as consumer sees Gloria as her “audience,” as Fitzgerald as sentimental romancer expressed the whole curve of her parallax for him.13 Anthony is amazed; Gloria is calling herself the equivalent of the Ameri­can popu­lar culture’s “cardboard paper doll,” “cut” for “the harlot’s mind” (Tender 68– 69). Anthony wants Gloria, the desired object, to refract romance and sentiment in the gap, while she sees herself reflecting the entire ensemble of her signification. Gloria calls herself, in effect, the “popu­lar sentimental,” as they battle over the politics of the epiphany that Anthony wants to have about her and that Fitzgerald then deconstructs. What Fitzgerald will call Dick Diver’s “low painful fire of intelligence” (196) is barely present; Anthony loses himself in a jumble of sentimental responses to Gloria, where Fitzgerald exposes his character’s sensibility and assesses his affinities. Anthony is a helpless swain before Gloria Gilbert in The Beautiful and Damned in 1922. She becomes the quintessential girl to fire Fitzgerald’s imagination: the “radiant sun” pouring forth in the “fragment of a sentence” and blindingly ordering all around her in multiple meanings (73). Fitzgerald will be more sure-­handed as the creator of Dick, ­Nicole, and Rosemary in Tender Is the Night. However, from the outset of Fitzgerald’s writing career, sentiment is also strongly questioned as female, popu­lar, clichéd, genteel, and overdetermined. Such was Fitzgerald’s dilemma through­out his writing career. The road to perceiving the beauty of “the girl” led through the popu­lar and sentimental; however great his ambition as a novelist, Fitzgerald was compelled to take that journey.

14 / Introduction

Fitzgerald’s paradoxical views of romance, sentiment, beauty, and the popu­ lar are carried forward into Tender Is the Night at his writer’s maturity. Gloria as romantic touchstone reigns supreme because she is beauty for Fitzgerald, a constant from which he will sentimentally process all value. Hume concludes, “Beauty results from the whole, when that complicated fig­ure is presented to an intelligent mind. . . . Till such a spectator appear, there is nothing but a fig­ ure of such particular dimensions and proportions: from his sentiments alone arise its elegance and beauty” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 242/292). This “complicated fig­ure” in Tender can also describe ­Nicole as the body of the Ameri­can continent (Tender 55), the Diver dinner party (34), the battlefield lecture (56–58), the Gold Star Mothers in Paris (100–101), the suffering of the Eczema Woman patient (183–85), and the charm of gay Francisco in Lausanne (245–46). Fitzgerald as author stands behind all his characters’ lessons on sentiment while in thrall to romance. Nowhere does he sustain as lush and devastating a dialogue between sentiment and romance as in Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald in the early 1920s converted the sentimental-­romantic moment into his own inner weather: “I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings and under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again” (Mellow 105). This Ameri­can consummation occurs in an aesthetic paradox of affect, where achieving the dream occurs in an already lost moment bathed in beauty that ends in a tearful male dissolve. Fitzgerald always risked the skepticism of a more hard-­ boiled response to his relentless sentimental perception.

Summary of Chapters The chapters in this book seek to describe sentiment’s overall effect on Fitzgerald’s work as deployed through what I stress as his identities, refractions, and influences. I undertake as full a reading of Tender Is the Night as I can, addressing the many angles of sentiment in the novel and in Fitzgerald’s career-­long affair with sentiment’s power and contradictions. Tender brilliantly surveys the whole spectrum of sentiment’s effects and compensations; Fitzgerald never stints or skimps on its excesses and outrages while attempting to render sentiment’s firm hold on him. In this study I apply an abundance of source materials to a sentimental imaginary that can drill deeply into the construction of Tender Is the Night and its meaning for the Fitzgerald canon and for Fitzgerald’s achievement as a novelist. “Part I: Identities” applies gendered and psychoanalytic approaches that represent and extend the latest generation of Fitzgerald scholarship in an era of identitarian theory. Chapter 1 reads several key sentimental scenes in Book One of Tender Is the Night to gauge the full range of Fitzgerald’s sentimental affiliations

Introduction / 15

and discontents. Chapter 2 takes Fitzgerald’s significant writerly mourning of his two dead baby sisters as a strong sentimental underpinning to Tender most evident in his pervasive structural repetitions of “saving” them. The homosocial intimations of Dick Diver about his charm and sympathetic nature within a sentimental matrix are the key subjects of Chapter 3. I want to avoid keying the text of Tender solely to Dick Diver’s emotional life, which would be a masculinist error on par with the older criti­cal reading of Tender as depicting traditional male self-­pity coupled with the dissolution of the romantic and/or tragic hero. My reading foregrounds the possibility of the two sisters being at the root of Dick’s (and Fitzgerald’s) anxious need to mirror themselves sympathetically in the eyes of their women; this reading makes it possible to analyze the collision of a putative but never-­written “matricide” in Tender with male “absorption” (Chapter 2) and a gendered text that of­ten queers the dynamic that Dick senses he inhabits (Chapter 3). Fitzgerald “outs” sentiment within a dynamic that gender studies can now theorize, for as Sedgwick notes there is perhaps no difference between sentimentality and its denunciation—only those prone to its “vicariating impulses” are equipped to detect them (Epistemology 153). Sentiment is a refracting current that flows unevenly between author and reader, spectator and suffering subject; sentiment must involve self-­serving, emotional overtures as well as selfless responses. Sentiment can reverse feeling by shifting the extension of sympathy from the suffering object to the refracted emotional well-­being of the spectator, reader, or subject. In “Part II: Refractions,” I undertake an in-­depth look at the increasing severity of ­Zelda’s illness and Scott’s reaction, both of which tore the life of the Fitzgeralds apart as a couple and family but also gave Scott a devastating narrative line of intent to selectively mine and finally use to complete Tender Is the Night. He had a fierce ownership of what became ­Nicole Warren Diver’s story as related to his novel’s completion, one that he consistently projected at ­Zelda’s expense and despite her own need to work and create. Chapter 4 analyzes the construction of the unsentimental ­Nicole and her more sentimental “sisters” (Rosemary Hoyt, Ophelia, “­Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald,” and the Eczema Woman patient); Chapter 5 deals with how these portrayals refracted through sentiment provided a key for Fitzgerald to express his complex grief and mourning in the intimate and writerly battle with Z ­ elda over their narrative material, which is the marrow of their creative lives and part of the sad unwinding of their marriage. In Chapter 6, I detail the relation of surrealism to the uncanny in Tender’s numerous key scenes that underscore Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental aesthetic. “Part III: Influences” examines an abundance of source and influence material that can tell us much about how Fitzgerald came under sentiment’s thrall as he completed the Tender manuscript. New sources for Tender’s imagining and aes-

16 / Introduction

thetics are found in the fig­ure of Florence Nightingale as well as in the works of Dickens, Faulkner, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. The manuscript record and compositional process of Tender yield similar lacunae, excisions, and obsessive rhetorical returns. For example, Chapter 7 examines ghosts of lines cut from ­Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” that prove provocative absences in Tender’s inscription. Chapter 7 also explores the haunting of the text by the eminent Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale. Chapter 8 looks at the influence of her more disreputable fictional colleague, Dickens’ Sarah Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, on Fitzgerald’s vision of Dick Diver as nurse. Chapter 9 contextualizes Tender Is the Night with relation to Faulkner’s Sanctuary and analyzes deep structural similarities between the two texts that Fitzgerald intuited as he linked Sanctuary to Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy in his own work. No Ameri­can male writer since Fitzgerald and no Ameri­can novel since Tender Is the Night have told us as much about sentiment’s powers and failings in authorizing fictions. Fitzgerald portrays a very conflicted Dick Diver who is partially a romantic nostalgic hero from an earlier century and partly a professional caretaker in a brave new world of psychoanaly­sis transacted in a culture of movie love within modernity, which is the twentieth century’s multi-­leveled sentimental environment in the West. Sentiment provides an intimate brief for his creative contradictions as well as for the sources of his novelistic authority. 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. Fitzgerald veers away from a classic sentimental response but doesn’t exhibit an ironic or cynical control of the trope. The severely contested forms of sentiment are relentlessly deployed and tested by Fitzgerald from the novel’s beginning to end.14 Tender Is the Night is arguably one of the most beautiful Ameri­can novels in its prose rhythms and imagery, yet it has always stunned its readers with the physical and psychic violence of the men and women at its center. Fitzgerald’s multiple role identifications expressed through paradigmatic sentimental scenes help explain in large measure the great range of emotional oppositions in Tender, from the highest romanticism to a gross violation of in­di­vidual bodies. It was not until the rise of feminist criticism and queer theory in the 1980s and ’90s, which helped foster renewed interest in such Ameri­can literary production as the nineteenth-century domestic novel, the slave narrative, the best seller, and more current ethnic and abuse narratives, that powerful commentary began to redress the calumny that sentiment had endured over most of the twentieth century as popu­lar, feminine, domestic, cheap, and commodified. While sentiment and its action wing of sympathy have been somewhat rehabilitated by a contemporary emphasis through the narratives of identity politics, they have also lost their innocence and been outed as

Introduction / 17

deeply inflected neoliberal power/knowledge at the limits of both familial and bodily integrity. We wish to retain sentiment’s mighty extension of affect but don’t quite know how. We feel we’ve lost some intimate part of ourselves through self-­consciousness and irony on the one hand; on the other, we are shamed and perplexed by the ability of the “helping” professions and the commodities of the culture industry to make us squeak like dolls with scripted responses. In these quandaries within the sentimental matrix, we are repeating the ambivalence that Fitzgerald expressed in Tender Is the Night many decades ago.

I Identities

1 “Rare,” “Whole-­Souled,” “Vicious” Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment in Book One of Tender Is the Night From Fitzgerald’s two mature novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, we learn about a love—perhaps it is peculiarly Ameri­can—that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness. It begins in romance, sentiment, even “glamour”—no one, I think, has remarked how innocent of mere “sex,” how charged with sentiment is Fitzgerald’s description of love in the jazz age. —Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination

Fitzgerald conceived Book One of Tender Is the Night through a series of sentimental stagings where the full range of sentiment’s power is posited from a n ­ aive sympathy through sadomasochistic identification. Fitzgerald intuited Freud’s redoubling of the traditional stakes of sentiment through the sexualized knowledge of its workings. Through these two linked subject positions, Fitzgerald fully partakes in a Humean emotional response to the roles of subject-­object as well as a Freudian gloss on sentiment’s imaginary in adversarial stances of embrace and denial. Tender Is the Night captures these moments in high modernism, ones that clearly define Fitzgerald’s fictional needs and achievement. The most completely rendered scenes in Book One of Tender Is the Night are those with full his­tori­ cal, emotional, and aesthetic resonance—classic accounts of sentiment converting affect into philosophical and aesthetic disquisition. When the Ameri­can psychiatrist Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night looks across at a long table of “gold star muzzers [mothers]” in a Paris restaurant in 1925, he sees Ameri­can women of different ages and social classes gathered together as a unit to mourn for their dead husbands, sons, and brothers who had fought with the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Fitzgerald concludes: “Over his wine Dick looked at them again; in their happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an older America. For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful. Momentarily, he sat again on his father’s knee, riding with Moseby [sic] while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him. Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women

22 / Chapter 1

at the table and faced the whole new world in which he believed” (100–01). Dick’s “two women” are his wife, ­Nicole Warren Diver, a paternal incest survivor and also his life-­long unofficial patient, and Rosemary Hoyt, an eighteen-­year-­ old Ameri­can movie starlet who has recently had great success in Daddy’s Girl. They represent the “whole new world” in which Dick and the twentieth century would come to “believe,” the world of institutional and therapeutic sympathy represented by Freudian analy­sis and the performative world of Hollywood which would give visual power to a new popu­lar dramatic rendering of emotional response. Taken together, Freudian love and movie love and their refracted representation would ultimately merge seduction and sympathy through sentiment’s tangled account of primal scenes and their compensations by Hollywood in modernity’s most popu­lar art form. Freudian love and movie love are deeply expressive of twentieth-century sentiment that coheres through the Foucaultian view that sexuality tells us our truth and is our truth. Yet Dr. Diver is equally caught in the nineteenth century’s residual moral and sentimental strictures. The dignified and strong Ameri­can women who make the room “beautiful” in their grief represent older strictures and contrast so forcefully with the two modern women under Dick’s charge who are emotionally wrecked (­Nicole) and unformed/commodified (Rosemary). The Gold Star Mothers in their mourning represent survivors from the heart of sentimental culture, a legacy from the nineteenth century’s official discourses of sentiment and sympathy in a number of realms in­clud­ing fiction, poetry, domestic society, popu­lar arts, and national narratives, both in America and in Europe. Instead of mothers mourning for dead men (sons), Fitzgerald radically alters the scene to the living, wherein Dick takes on the burden of sustaining the two women. The male psychiatrist objectifies ­Nicole and Rosemary by assigning them their roles in his sentimental reverie for a maternal past and in an uncertain desiring commitment to the therapeutic future. As a final element in the mix, Fitzgerald has Dick remember his own South­ ern roots; he has him recall the image of the dashing mounted man in gray who represented martial daring but also romantic codes, “loyalties” that he learned “on his father’s knee.” In this rich sentimental scene, Fitzgerald portrays a very conflicted Dick Diver, part romantic nostalgic hero from an earlier century, part caretaker of a brave new world of psychoanaly­sis, which underwrites the twentieth century’s quintessential sentimental and aesthetic environment in the West. He will move within these sentimental discourses and boundaries, figuratively from mothers to daughters, always as caregiver but also as brother, father, son, husband, seducer, dandy, drunkard, romantic idealist, general, director, actor, party host, nostalgist, and nurse. Tender Is the Night is an ambitious novel; its formidable range finally brought

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment / 23

to completion the project that Fitzgerald had fitfully reworked over the decade since The Great Gatsby (1925). In Book One, Tender’s large cast of characters, dozens of European settings, and supposedly uneven narration have contributed to the relegation of the novel to sec­ond position behind the tight sym­metri­cal gem of Gatsby. Tender, while redolent with gorgeous prose, wisdom of the heart, and ambitious historicizing, has of­ten been difficult to bring together thematically and ideo­logi­cally for the reader. This chapter provides an analy­sis of several key scenes in Book One of Tender to bring forth issues and achievements in the novel that can be more adequately discussed within a sentimental frame. Sentiment has a long and varied history in the philosophy and fiction of the West in the last four centuries, but it is safe to say that sentiment was never as derided as it was by early twentieth-century modernity and thus by the creative and criti­ cal tenets of literary modernism. When Fitzgerald writes “sentiment” or “sentimentality” in Tender in 1934, he does so in a chaos of signification. He writes in the midst of a clash between sentiment’s residual Victorian power and influence as well as under the sign of an already established distaste for the sentimental as devalued and cheapened, a view he shared in some measure on the surface while he was obsessed with sentiment in the deep structures of his imagination. How Fitzgerald negotiates this varied sentimental field in different contexts in Tender defines paradigmatic conflicts over the multiple meanings of affect for authors, characters, and readers. This negotiated field charts the ways in which sentiment was evolving in the analytical and entertainment cultures of the modern and ­postmodern West. Sentiment always becomes, in Eve Sedgwick’s phrase, a “structure of relation” (143), both “honorific” and “most damning,” most of­ten at the same time (150); she posits a slippage between identification and desire (159) in the complex associations of wanting to be and wanting to have. In multiple contexts, Fitzgerald in Tender explores and enacts sentiment while both naming and suppressing its conundrums. Indeed, in Book One alone, sentiment is rhetorically called a “rarer atmosphere” (34), “whole-­souled” (57), and “vicious” (69); sentiment is also strictly implied (100–01) and markedly felt in its absence (112). Fitzgerald’s emotional range can repeatedly be gauged by his inscriptions of sentiment in specific public-­ private environments: dinner parties, battlefield cemeteries, movie screenings, a group of grieving mothers, and a hysterical incest victim pleading for privacy. Furthermore, “Dick Diver” is a site where and in whom Sedgwick would feel the sentimental had come to be lodged after the 1880s: “the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who . . . physically dramatizes . . . a struggle of masculine identity with emotions” (146). Sedgwick sentimentally locates for male bodies in gender studies what Nina Baym has classically titled the “melodrama of beset manhood” in Ameri­

24 / Chapter 1

can fiction and criticism.1 Sentiment never scrutinizes the true or the beautiful in splendid isolation but moves such concepts into relations between human subjects in coercive and intimate ways that we both crave and suspect. Indeed “moving” and being “moved” are key components for Chandler in describing sentiment’s “landscape of shifting sight lines” (174).2 Never out of sentiment’s thrall, Fitzgerald wars within the term while he relentlessly elaborates on its usage in Book One of Tender. Sentimental dynamics are in play across a range of criti­cal discourses on the emotions. Diana Fuss cites the Freud of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) to the effect that identification is always ambivalent, that it can be “an expression of tenderness” as well as a “wish for someone’s removal,” that the base of identification can be murderous as well as cannibalizing (93).3 Senti­ment consistently plays with feeling as excess emotional capital in a distinctive ­erotics of material re-­presentation. Sentiment is not generated in response to suffering but is produced within the dynamic of suffering within reader relations to a text. We as readers mime in a controlled environment our life-­world emotional encounters, redoubled in textual recreation through the act of reading. Within Book One of Tender, Fitzgerald sought to portray and reflect upon emotion in what Elizabeth Dillon calls sentimentalism’s “radical oscillation of claims” (515). Such an oscillation in the sentimental contract between intimate parties—what Žižek would call the parallax of the gap—underscores the ominous attempt by Dick Diver to achieve the union of “Dicole” with his incestuously raped wife, to be a couple tethered to one another at all times in the name of love and therapy. The logic of the care-­full sentimental, however, is pushed toward the catastrophic end points of incest and rape themselves (Hendler 128), a fact hardly grasped by the reader in the shocking and mystifying collapse of ­Nicole at the conclusion of Book One. Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night chronicles sentiment’s strongest implications about male power’s contradictory aims: to dominate women and the family, to try to save, protect, and seduce them, and to disastrously blur the differences.

The Divers Give a Party Fitzgerald crafts a communal circle of sentimental affection through an early scene in which Rosemary Hoyt attends the Divers’ elegant dinner party at the Villa Diana. Rosemary’s impressions are a sentimental high point in Tender that almost magically transform the night for the expatriate Ameri­cans: Rosemary, as dewy with belief as a child from one of Mrs. Burnett’s vicious tracts,4 had a conviction of homecoming, of a return from the derisive and salacious improvisations of the frontier. There were fireflies riding

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment / 25

on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-­away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to everyone at the table, ­singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up—the moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there. (34) The Divers’ party is where a community of taste is formed; those fortunate enough to be in the sentimental moment are deemed the elect. They mutually reinforce each other in a tacit sharing of norms, in which aesthetic appreciation of their environment is enhanced by their sense of being “included” through the group sympathy that they share in what Dillon would call sentiment’s “affective immediacy” (508, 515). In a chronotope, the assembled expatriate Ameri­cans are welcomed off the degraded “frontier” of the Riviera or of Rosemary’s Hollywood, a “salacious improvisation” of its own, to an “Ameri­can” table, one that gives them back themselves at their best; “detached from the world,” they and the Divers almost appear to be floating in the stars.5 The people at the Diver table are in “the dark universe” on Tender’s movie screen yet watching the “film” at the same time. They desire only to be included by Dick and ­Nicole who “expand” in performance as did Gatsby who “concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor” (Gatsby 48), sentimentally confirming your best sense of self where sympathy is projective identification. The sophistication of the guests is swept away as they become more like Victorian orphans (“faces of poor children at a Christmas tree”), yearning toward the Divers. In earlier manuscript drafts, Fitzgerald had written “sentiment” as “loving kindness” but its accent is lost “before it could be irreverently breathed,” as if such a sentimental occasion is unbearable and unsustainable. Sentiment is a way to firm up what would be; it is a way of staying behind in sensation, to take another bite of space before falling through the image. The idea that sentiment will make the affect last is itself a sentimental view. The affective mood provisionally summoned by Fitzgerald in the “rarer atmo-

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1. A Chorus Line of Fitzgeralds, Paris, Christmas 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers. Manuscript Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library. Fitzgerald Literary Trust. Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

sphere” of the Diver party scene does not require a suffering subject but rather a democratic inclusion in an haute bourgeois moment of well-­being. The performed scene features a group of party guests, not a family, an eclectic “Ameri­ can” round-­up of an actress (and her mother), a composer (and wife), a popu­lar novelist (and wife), a movie director, a soldier-­of-­fortune, a socialite matron, and two gay males, with a psychiatrist and rich patient-­wife as hosts. The “dark universe” of stars is the “nourishment” and the only light, borrowing from the night of Keats’ nightingale and warm South (see Chapter 7). Fitzgerald pulls back his curtain to show the constructedness of sentiment (a “mechanical dancing platform”) and still wants his party guests (and readers) to be moved by it. Such is

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a shared aura of community, a very Ameri­can one built at sentiment’s table; the goal of hearts going out to one another is without tears and seemingly without stress or manipulation in its romance. A writer with immense gifts to invoke an evanescent mood, Fitzgerald knew better than any of his readers and critics his power to imagine such sentimental moments, which is why when Dick Diver is praised for his ability to always say the right thing before his fall, he pronounces it as “a trick” and “a trick of the heart” (164, 216). Fitzgerald conceived sentiment as a “trick” of the language in which he soared and also mistrusted his affects. Perhaps the sentimental high point of romantic description in the Fitzgerald canon is Gatsby and Daisy’s kiss on the Louisville street—“unutterable visions [wedded] to her perishable breath,” “tuning fork touched upon a star”—that Nick Carraway immediately interprets through the haze of what he calls Gatsby’s “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 112, emphasis mine). Nick’s guilty pleasure and approbation at such language has stamped him as male, modern, and realistic for successive criti­cal reading generations. In Tender as well, Fitzgerald initially discounts Rosemary’s viewpoint as “dewy with belief ” but then makes yet another room “beautiful.” Fitzgerald can do the sentimental in different voices but never without an anxiety borne out of knowledge of its powerful fragility, so mistrusted due to modernist criti­cal denigration. Arguably, the famous conclusion of Gatsby is a true rare sentimental moment. Nick’s vision to counter the “appalling sentimentality” of the new world seen by the Dutch sailors compelled him to “wonder” for the last time in human history. Here Nick experiences the passion of “wonder” described by Philip Fisher as a powerful basis for human inquiry and understanding and the ground for the intellectual play of thought.6 Fitzgerald is always mixing and matching sentiment, both “appalling” and “rare,” “whole-­souled” and “vicious.”7 The “salacious” grouping is suddenly swept up by Fitzgerald’s rhetoric into a beauty more powerful than individuals. Rosemary’s Ameri­can and Hollywood (camera) eye is necessary for the sentimental illusion that is always about to vanish for Fitzgerald in a “dying fall.” The Divers’ magic recedes and fades, almost as if it were the province of genies going back into a bottle. In a mad episode only gradually revealed to the reader, ­Nicole promptly disappears into the Villa Diana. Dick’s own emotional absorption links him precisely to ­Nicole’s bizarre “sweeping” of “keepsakes”— sentiment’s quintessential material artifacts—into her yellow purse. Fitzgerald is brilliant in these analogies, suggesting that direction by Dick is itself a violation. The community of taste at the Divers’ Riviera party has a volatile base in which the sentimental semiotics are quite “viciously” exposed in their motivation. Sentiment performed by the Divers thus achieves the sort of “worked-­up” quality that for its critics harbors its basic insincerity in an excess of feeling not countered by thought or reflection. “To be swept up” is to have one’s ticket punched

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for the promise of sentiment’s “rarer atmosphere,” but the cost is always high for the Divers and for Fitzgerald.8

Dick Diver Makes a Battlefield Speech When Fitzgerald moves from the privatizing of sentimental feeling among a group of privileged Ameri­cans to a lecture on “whole-­souled sentimental equipment” by Dick Diver, he widens his lens in Tender Is the Night to implicate sentiment in a concentrated historicized analy­sis of World War I’s causes. Dick Diver provides a tour of a battlefield cemetery to Rosemary, ­Nicole, and Abe and Mary North in 1925. They walk the fields of Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval in France, sites of some of the worst carnage in the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1916. Paul Fussell has called it “the largest engagement since the beginning of civilization” as eleven British divisions totaling 110,000 men attacked and 60,000 were killed or wounded; the four-month-long British offensive yielded 420,000 British dead or wounded (13, 175). How does a coherent mourning begin to grieve in the face of such massive torment? Sentiment itself became a major casualty of World War I’s horror on all fronts, losing its remaining innocence as a structure of feeling in the face of such a staggering amount of dead, suffered by all the European great powers. Sentiment’s key roles in the prehistory of modernity, to battles won and definitions assured (sentiment as anti-­slavery, pro-­women, and pro-­child), were obliterated by their rhetorical and imaginative inadequacy before the devastation of the war, particularly trench warfare with its thousands of fragmented and missing corpses. The literary histories that speak to the representation of World War I in English literature usually invoke the contrast of ­Rupert Brooke’s last lyric poetry at war’s beginning in 1914 with the somber quiet of Wilfred Owen’s voice at war’s end. Fitzgerald writes knowingly in the wake of that shift: Dick Diver is both a romantic and sentimental clinician. In the middle of the nineteenth-century America, rural cemeteries became some of the most familiar sentimental sites with their headstone inscriptions of homely prose and poetry. Death poems as keepsakes were of­ten buried with the loved one as well. In canonical Ameri­can literature, Emily Dickinson’s many (unsentimental) poems on the cusp of a death experience are some of the most notable in her canon; Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford is the teenage “death poet” whose career is mercifully cut short in Huckleberry Finn. When Fitzgerald merges the aura of the battlefield and its sacrifices with the already sentimental cemetery setting, the atmosphere for Dick’s speech is severely overdetermined. The tour of the battlefield cemetery may best be described as a psychic keepsake of its own that occurs in real time and functions as a sentimental encyclopedia doubly framed by Fitzgerald’s powerful sentimental analy­sis.9

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Fussell’s influential study of World War I imaginative writing repeatedly dismisses much of its sentimental response as inadequate to the brutal and complex facts of the horrible war in the trenches. Fought within the proximity of great European capitals, a short day’s trip from Lon­don or Paris, the grotesque and fantastic physical annihilation appeared to obliterate sentiment’s more “normal” conferral of mourning for the suffering and the dead; there were so of­ten no bodies or even identifiable body parts for burial. Therefore Fitzgerald imagines Dick Diver performing a sentimental analy­sis of a de-­individualized sentimental matrix, one he both respects and must reject and mourn for. He writes:



Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval. Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness. He went on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse. He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he had not. “This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to ­Rosemary. She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to do—she wanted to talk to her mother. “There are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe consolingly. Rosemary waited tensely for Dick to continue. (56)

As they move through the trenches, Dick resembles at first the battlefield commander as Fitzgerald depicts him “peering” over the top through field glasses as if expecting an enemy force to materialize. He is excited and behaving as teacher and guide while “straining with sadness.” History’s distancing sentimentally converts Dick’s anger into a privatized sec­ond level “feeling about” grief and sorrow: “all my safe lovely world blew itself up” (57). He casts the land’s cost in economic terms (“this land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer”) but Rosemary, a Hollywood daughter who knows a cue from a romantic leading man, “obediently” looks at his imaginatively created landscape as an act of love, which confuses her. Dick returns to his analy­sis:



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“See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco——” “That’s different. This west­ern-­front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous surety between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-­souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfathers’ whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-­five.” “No, he didn’t—he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-­class love spent here. This was the last love battle.” (56–57)

Dick shifts from his physical survey of the battlefield to his interpretive commentary, speaking as a reflective analyst of middle-class repression who concludes as a saddened romantic. Fitzgerald thus provides a vivid analy­sis of the popu­lar cultural and generational rituals that gave Europe a sentimental sense of self through the long “peace” of the nineteenth century. These sentimental clusters provided a collective memory of predictable icons—family, church, royalty, first love, holidays, and sport—that finally comprise a European version of “What We’re Fighting For” and “Our Way of Life,” which function as the typical ensemble of what sends men into battle beyond the official economic, military, and geopo­liti­cal aims. The soldiers on all sides have affection for their affections, for a crossing of sentimental lines. With Dick’s literary examples of Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne, Fitzgerald is imagining the sentimental Victorian artifacts, icons, and “experiences” through a popu­lar cultural lens. Within the scene, he crafts a minor gem of cultural criticism of a sort not truly in vogue in America until decades later through New Historicism and Cultural Studies.

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment / 31

Dick feels sentimental about his sentimental analy­sis in this redoubled dynamic, which includes his own self-­conscious citing of sources. Fitzgerald instinctively approaches Europe’s collective sentimentality through the writings of a Lewis Carroll, featuring the heroism of Alice, a prepubescent girl who is subjected to bizarre adventures at the hands of a fantastic set of maternal and paternal fig­ures displaced into huge playing cards and demented animals. She’s already become part of psycho-­sexual history to psychiatrist Dr. Diver, who knows too much about an older man venerating young girls. Dick cites Carroll and Alice as key ingredients of sentiment’s queasy warmth and intimacy with undertones of erotic darkness; and yet this will be eagerly consumed by the popu­lar culture, which both desires Alice and wishes her to be unscathed at the end of her adventures. How Jules Verne would “invent” this love battle along with Carroll would be through his futuristic and sensational use of machines in travel and warfare in Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, nineteenth-century equivalents of Star Wars and numerous other technological cinematic romances. To complete the catalogue through European popu­lar fiction, Undine is a nineteenth-century German novel about a water sprite that marries a mortal. This twin diet of “innocent” seduction and sensation, the palatable versions of sex, violence, and childhood, stitch their narratives in and around the impressionistic guided tour through Europe’s “picturesque” sentimental landscape, which includes France (cafes in Valence and marraines [godmothers]), England (the Crown Prince, the Derby, and country deacons), and Germany (Unter den Linden, Westphalia, and Wurtemburg) as well as the more ubiquitous Christ­ mas celebrations, postcards, weddings, grandfathers, and girls. Dick describes the middle class making love to itself through memories in a collective incest across borders, and then transferring all the hazy bourgeois satisfaction into outward battle. As an Ameri­can, he knows he is a “soldier” with “whole-­souled” equipment in that huge sentimental army and campaign. Finally, the cultural analy­sis is mounted as Dick’s performance for Rosemary so that Dick can hold forth as “the old romantic” as he calls himself, one for whom “the silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken” (58). When Rosemary feels ignored by Dick, whose object of affection is the sentimental nineteenth century, she protests, “I’m romantic, too.” Rosemary understands “romantic” as applying to herself, “the girl in the picture.” For Fitzgerald, it’s “whole-­souled” sentiment that sends Europe off to war in 1914 but it’s the “old romantic” who mourns what is lost, reinforcing Amory Blaine’s distinctions voiced in This Side of Paradise.10 What finally moves Rosemary to “sudden tears” (59) is a sentimental inscription, more on the order of World War I’s most famous popu­lar poem, “In Flanders Fields” (1916), with its conventional view of the continual sacrifice of more men to the memory of those already become “bloody rugs.”11 The available

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sentimental pub­lic language finally makes Rosemary cry, not Dick’s sec­ond-­order “telling” her which things were “ludicrous” and “sad.” Within Dick’s performance of sentiment comes what Lori Merish has labeled the “theatricalization of one’s inner life,” a self-­consciousness that one is always staging and being staged (50). Dick Diver’s narrative viewpoint redacts the battlefield scene through his forceful charm, mingling sentiment and romance. The narrative version of refraction is redaction—the one who sympathizes is always projecting an internal edited consciousness onto an external scene. Dick Diver’s lecture is an extravagant mini-­epic drawing on a flooded line of audience feelings about his­tori­cal “certainties.” Fitzgerald understands that an author’s effects must be earned, that authors continually walk the line in their effects and may tip into sentimentality.12 In the “dying fall” from his battlefield lecture, Dick’s sentiment is sure and honest at the sea of military graves when he gently convinces one bewildered young Ameri­can girl from Tennessee searching for the grave of her lost brother to lay her wreath on the marker of an anonymous ­soldier:



“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.” “Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her. “You reckon that’s what I ought to do?” “I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.” It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder. She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-­cab and ride back to Amiens with them. (58–59)

Here is sentiment at its best, extended simply to a living person at her present time of need, as Fitzgerald contrasts both Dick’s speech and Dick’s self-­conscious wrapping of himself in gold and silver nostalgia. Sentiment grows out of the scene itself rather than being placed in an interpretive grid over it. Fitzgerald provides the graceful ending in response to the sea of graves: one girl, one wreath, one tombstone. Even as Dick’s battlefield speech is melodramatic, his emotional response here is honest and for the girl, not his familiar audience. The minimalizing into one act of mourning as well as Dick’s grace in handling that moment is “whole-­ souled” and stands for World War I mourning rather than the inflation that Dick creates through his speech.13 This swing and difference between a massive sentimental judgment and a quiet intimate scene shows sentiment’s dangerous versatility and seduction of the viewer-­reader. The line between sentiment and senti-

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mentality probes the ethics of narrative’s drama and helps Fitzgerald provide the differing emotional tenor of the dualities in key scenes of Tender.

Rosemary Screens a Movie After their tour of the battlefield cemetery and encounter with the red-­headed girl from Tennessee, Dick and his entourage return to Paris where he and ­Rosemary come ever closer to being lovers. The next day, Rosemary gets Dick on her own turf, in the screening room at Franco Ameri­can Films where the Divers, the Norths, and Collis Clay watch Daddy’s Girl with her. In the darkness “she was alone with Dick at last” (68), both on screen and with shoulders touching. Fitzgerald describes her in the film: There she was—the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out stiffly like the solid hair of a tanagra fig­ure; there she was—so young and innocent—the product of her mother’s loving care; there she was—embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting a new cardboard paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind. She remembered how she had felt in that dress, especially fresh and new under the fresh young silk. Daddy’s girl. Was it a ’itty-­bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Ooo-­ooo-­ tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn’t she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitable became evitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away. Women would forget the dirty dishes at home and weep, even within the picture one woman wept so long that she almost stole the film away from Rosemary. She wept all over a set that cost a fortune, in a Duncan Phyfe dining room, in an aviation port, and during a yacht-­race that was only used in two flashes, in a subway and finally in a bathroom. (68–69) Rosemary becomes the sentimental subject instead of a Diver party guest or the audience for Dick’s sentimental disquisition. Each viewer watches Rosemary alone in a sentimental distillation; each heart “goes out” to her in private—there she was.14 In Daddy’s Girl, Rosemary is the Ameri­can culture’s classic sentimental victim, a “young girl at risk,” who was instantiated in Ameri­can bestsellers of the 1850s by authors such as Susan Warner and Maria Cummins and especially in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the young Eva St. Clare, whose “heart is hurt” by slavery, becomes ill and dies “because of it” and eventually triumphs as a Christian angel. Rosemary as daddy’s girl is a late aspirant in a long tradition of secular slippage of this narrative fig­ure. Fitzgerald is roused to a most negative assessment of sentiment through Dick describing Rosemary’s role and the audience response.

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Fitzgerald employs free indirect discourse in this scene to great effect, as he switches the narrative vantage point several times. No longer the schoolgirl, ­Rosemary’s innocence is a “product,” brought to finish by her mother, her immaturity that of Ameri­can popu­lar culture, which consumes her as a “cardboard paper doll” in its “empty harlot’s mind.” Yet Rosemary as actress is immediately described as coincident with her dress as “fresh and new.” Then the passage moves from her character’s memory to parodic babble in what might be called early “Shirley Temple-­speak.” Suddenly her character’s fist is “tiny” and the language sarcastic. The will of the tiny daughter is that of the Ameri­can grown woman; all intricate modes of argument are helpless before that will as “reason” cannot stand before sentimental feeling. Housewives flock to her film and cry along with an actress who weeps all over the film set. Fitzgerald sardonically allies with a cornerstone of our contemporary theorizing of the sentimental in which tears on the page or screen are conceived as intimately shared with the audience. Fitzgerald in creating and commenting on Daddy’s Girl darts around the dialogized spectacle, amused, angry, and protective of Rosemary, then sneering at her role, finally defending her virtue from Hollywood itself. His viewpoints dazzle as he torments the film. Fitzgerald’s is conflating two early modern mini-­genres of sentimental and melodramatic production involving young girls: screen heroines playing “younger” than their age (such as Rosemary), only to be swept away by a benign adult male, and the Shirley Temple (b. 1928) phenomenon, which established her as the lead­ing female Hollywood star and won her a special tiny Oscar in 1934, the year of Tender’s publication. Shirley Temple of­ten played a character in the vicarious role of a tot therapist. She solved adult romantic problems, sof­tened the heart of male curmudgeons, and restored everyone around her to sunnier emotional health. Shirley Temple’s role as family counselor and cohesive force hearkens back to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), a movie of which in 1921 starred twenty-­seven-­year-­old Mary Pickford as both young ­Cedric Fauntleroy and his mother! These cross-­gendered possibilities and fantasies are most certainly on Fitzgerald’s mind with Daddy’s Girl (see Chapter 8).15 Early in Book Two of Tender, Dick, searching for analogies to ­Nicole’s epistolary style, references narratives such as Daddy Long Legs and Molly Make Believe (121)—­successes as plays or fiction prior to World War I—­which were then made and remade in Hollywood—in which girls on the edge of sexual maturity have vicarious relationships with older men who magically shift from “daddy” to “lover and husband” with no ostensible Freudian tension.16 Rosemary herself is the fictional incarnation of the actress Lois Moran (b. 1907), whom Fitzgerald had met and been infatuated by during his first tour of duty in Hollywood in 1927. Moran had achieved moderate success as an ingénue, first as a daughter moving up the social ladder in the definitive female sen-

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timental weepie about a mother’s sacrifice, Stella Dallas (1925), and then in Just Suppose (1926). Thus the “Daddy’s Girl” aura draws from many sources for Fitzgerald: a constant slippage occurs with regard to age, innocence, and sexuality. “Sentimental” is the adjective that also stitches together the tension for Scott and ­Zelda regarding Lois Moran and, in a later abortive encounter, Shirley Temple herself. It’s generally acknowledged that Fitzgerald was never alone with Lois Moran, who lived with her widowed mother (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur 257–58). Z ­ elda, however, scornfully accused Scott of engaging “in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child” (303); in 1930 Z ­ elda wrote that she had “just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other” at the same time she imagined that she was forming a lesbian attachment to her ballet teacher (Cline 293, 305). Indeed Scott faithfully gives ­Nicole his most comprehensive indictment of the “daddy’s girl” phenomenon when she decries “the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-­children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world” (Tender 291). However, Scott was not above writing Shirley Temple’s mother in 1940 to ask if she might be interested in having Shirley play Honoria in a film of his story “Babylon Revisited.” Fitzgerald had no qualms in opining to Mrs. Temple that Shirley’s previous film vehicle Young People (1940) “was rather nauseating in its sentimentality” (Temple 322); Shirley as Honoria presumably would have been, for Fitzgerald, in a “rarer” sentimental vehicle.17 Rosemary’s powerful performance wins over even the sophisticated entourage in the Diver party who cannot truly help themselves. Near the conclusion of the screening, Fitzgerald writes, “Then back to Daddy’s Girl: happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality” (69). “Vicious” describes the false simplicity and triumph through the tidy, innocent gloss on the relation of fathers and daughters. Fitzgerald has identified the Hollywood heart at the center of what truly moves Tender’s drama— ­Nicole’s violation. The “production” of Rosemary as a created sentimental object is carefully distilled from paternalism with sexual violation only as the deep background story that is displaced for the audience. Freud had initially cast the domestic as a sexual battleground. Hollywood with its instincts to materialize the erotic and then to cover the story with a genteel wise virgin (age five to twenty) re-­contains what Freud had exposed as the potential sexual predation of the bourgeois family while preserving a whiff of the defiled nursery. Fitzgerald was never fooled. Massumi cites Spinoza that “the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that attains the level of conscious reflection” (31, emphasis Massumi); indeed, Dick “winces” for all psychologists at the “father complex,” at a conscious sentimentalizing that Dr. Diver understands is a dissonant loop as Rosemary on screen unspools to preserve sensation and affect without confronting illicit de-

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sire and sadomasochism. Dick is in full possession of what the innocent reader of Tender in Book One is not: the lie of Daddy’s Girl that Tender is about: ­Nicole’s abuse, primal in its “viciousness.” Fitzgerald always understood that everything “vicarious” is potentially “vicious.”18 Gilles Deleuze writes of a putative sentimental coercion in which “the other side of generality to which sympathy invites us is partiality,” that it is an “inequality of affection” that “sympathy bestows upon us as a characteristic of our nature” (38). Deleuze then cites Hume who notes that such excess may “make us regard any remarkable transgression of such a degree of partiality, either by too great an enlargement, or contraction of the affections, as vicious and immoral” (38, quoting Hume, Treatise 488). Fitzgerald uncannily uses “vicious” in precisely Hume’s meaning to describe the overwhelming affect of the huge screen image of Rosemary in Daddy’s Girl. There is no end to the tricks of distancing from which we can, as readers and viewers, participate in the suffering of others, real and/or imagined. “Vicious” can be and always is directed at a fault or corruption of sentiment’s affective life. An implied sentimental current flows through all the characters in Book One and dictates their actions and responses with darker revelations to come. It will always be a question of “good” or “bad” sentiment for Fitzgerald since sensibility, vehicle, setting, history, and community are all in one way or another linked for him through feeling; the affective immediacy of their sentimental “moment” had the greatest priority for him as a writer. Forter comments that Fitzgerald “seems to have experienced modernity as a doubly gendered danger, at once coercively masculinizing and degradingly feminizing.” Forter cites Fitzgerald acidly writing to Hemingway that for his popu­lar magazine work, “The Post now pay [sic] the old whore $4000 a screw. But now its [sic] because she’s mastered the 40 ­positions—in her youth one was enough” (Bruccoli, Life in Letters 169). In a file Fitzgerald called “Rough Stuff,” he wrote in his notebooks, “My mind is the loose cunt of a whore, to fit all genitals” (no. 1390, p. 213). Forter concludes that Fitzgerald experienced popu­lar writing “in terms of an abjectly feminizing receptivity through which one conforms to the exploitative demands of the consumer marketplace” (Forter 145). Daddy’s Girl is the deft expression of that marketplace and of Fitzgerald’s dark and complex views on sentiment’s range.

Dick and the Gold Star Mothers Fitzgerald conceives of Dick Diver richly interpreting the Ameri­can sentimental legacy of female power and authority from the domestic mothers of the Victorian nineteenth century. A significant cluster of sentimental images occurs in the Paris restaurant where Dick, ­Nicole, and Rosemary see the tables of Ameri­can Gold Star Mothers. Rosemary, the Hollywood ingénue, knows enough to cry on

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cue at this sentimental scene of maternal patriotism; ­Nicole, the patient-­wife and abused daughter, observes flatly, “Probably the young ones are the wives” (100). “Sentiment” is never named in this scene, yet it is everywhere most suggestively projected. Dick’s extended conceit about the meaning of the Gold Star Mothers hovers between that of an imaginative epiphany stressing sentiment’s aesthetic impulse and a prophetic turn toward his future, which comprises sentiment’s heteronomy when connected to desire, vocation, and society. Fitzgerald has Dick practice what William James believed the pragmatist accomplished when he “turns [his] face toward connectedness of fact and towards the future” ( James 110); it is exemplified in this scene by Dick constructing his responses according to “the whole new world in which he believed.” Dick’s appraisal of the Gold Star Mothers is one of intense sentiment where he intuits their sadness but honors their ability to successfully mourn with dignity. Dick finally turns back to himself and his modern plight, a melancholy and a self-­pity that is a product of what he also feels for his life with ­Nicole and complications with Rosemary.19 The curve of Dick’s intimation begins through what Bakhtin calls the pathos of “sentimental psychological novels” where the speaker of “openly pathetic discourse” assumes the conventional role of a teacher or preacher and makes a “polemical appeal based on . . . a direct impression from the object or from life” (395, 398).20 Fitzgerald imagines an act of seeing with the topography of actual warfare converted into a temporal figuration. The elements of Victorian coherence and links to the Civil War and the sadness of World War I carnage are brilliantly compressed by Fitzgerald into four sentences. Pathos brings the suffering inside the consciousness of the narrative voice as Dick distills the essence of the moment in what becomes a familiar modernist turn; his reflection redoubles itself in reflexivity. Sedgwick calls the extended conceit that Fitzgerald projects through the mothers, ­Nicole, and Rosemary the “the ability to articulate the world as a whole,” and “the specular axis between two closets” (222). To animate such an “articulation” and “axis,” Heather Love in Feeling Backward points to a “turning” that she identifies with his­tori­cal ruins that nonetheless have an intense relationship to any imagined future. She comments on this sense of “turning” as the “fig­ure of figuration itself ” that creates an image repertoire of “queer modernist melancholia” (5). Love cites Judith Butler’s “strategy of reverse discourse” and “constant reclamation and constant turning” (18). She is particularly interested in Walter Benjamin’s now iconic interpretation of what has become known as “The Angel of History.” The following is Benjamin’s ninth thesis from his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940):



A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His

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eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Such a reluctant turning and gazing on the carnage while being blown backward into the future is certainly the motion of Dick Diver as he seizes on the spectacle of the Gold Star Mothers and their mourning for the World War I dead before, “with an effort,” he turns to the “future” and modernity where ­Nicole and Rosemary wait.21 The Angel’s vision momentarily makes whole what has been destroyed; perhaps in Fitzgerald’s phrase, it makes the pre-­World War I Victorian room “beautiful” again but the angel (is this Dick?) is hurled into the future by the “storm.” Dick turns back from a sentimental culture of coherent mourning to the melancholy romantic present and his two women whom he must “carry” into the therapeutic future, itself another sentimentalizing of his burden. After a brief masculine moment at his father’s “knee,” he is seemingly armed with both maternal and paternal power. Dick always “repeats” Daddy while treating D ­ addy’s abuse by readily assuming the transference, “carrying” and “absorbing” it to write ­Nicole’s future. Through the parallax of the Gold Star Mothers’ rumination, Fitzgerald crafts an interior monologue for Dick Diver that is both an analy­sis of him and worthy of the same by him.22 Dick Diver’s strong identification with his minister father and nineteenth-­century mothers weds the powerful allies whom Ann Douglas sees as sitting astride the Ameri­can nineteenth-century sentimental culture as its articulators and arbiters of feeling. Douglas conceives of liberal Protestant ministers covet­ing and emu­lat­ ing a maternal role—in essence having nowhere else to go in the c­ ulture and thus essentially moving in a world of women (78). Instead of a parish of women, Dr. Diver has a clinic and deals with a world of parents, children, and sexual conflict. These “spots” of time show sentiment supplemented by romance—­Fitzgerald’s key deployment in all his fiction—with the mothers’ narrative matched by the father’s narrative.23 The thick description of Ameri­can mothers, matching perhaps the overfurnished Victorian scene itself, gives way to the more tentative and promissory note of performative Dr. Diver. Dick, like the Dutch sailors in The Great Gatsby, is “compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face” (Gatsby 180) with ­Nicole and Rosemary.

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Fitzgerald imagines the sentimental current as all-­encompassing; he is “thinking the image” in a mis en abyme turning them all—mothers, Rosemary, ­Nicole— into sentimental objects. Fitzgerald’s politics of this epiphanic “freezing” converts sentiment into a pathos of sensibility that privileges the reader in aesthetic reimagining. Fitzgerald’s sentiment in this modernist guise is never so elegant and intelligent. He shows that Dick must sentimentally carry the egos (Tender 245) and cannot lose them. Only by staging the recovery of the past in his future can Dick Diver (and Scott Fitzgerald) live through sentimental performance.

­Nicole Diver: Affect without Mediation of Sentiment Such a rare moment of suspension among past, present, and future as in the scene with the Gold Star Mothers and Dick’s “two women” can never be sustained in Tender Is the Night. After the exchange of bloody bed linen across the Paris hotel hallway, Rosemary comes upon a scene of horror in the Diver bathroom: And now Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and in the shape of horror took form again. . . . ­Nicole knelt be­side the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. “It’s you!” she cried,—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn’t let me. . . . “Control yourself, ­Nicole!” “I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.” “Control yourself. Get up——” (112) Book One’s abrupt and violent conclusion during ­Nicole’s breakdown is made more barbarous by the absence of sentiment when it is needed most by all characters. Book One ends on an explosion into knowledge for the reader of ­Nicole’s instability without revealing the reasons for it. After a burlesque involving the Af­ ri­can Ameri­can and Af­ri­can European expatriates stalking one another in a plot that Abe North blunders into and cannot prevent, a black man named Jules Peterson bleeds to death after being murdered and is placed in Rosemary’s bed. Dick’s resultant great blunder in attempting to save Rosemary from scandal leads to his triggering a mad episode from ­Nicole—the true “Daddy’s Girl” as incestuous rape

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victim. Dick exchanges with her the bloody coverlets from Rosemary’s bed where the murdered Peterson had been placed for fresh ones from the Divers’ own bed. Dick’s infatuation with Rosemary moves him to fail ­Nicole by coarsely reminding her of her violation, indeed revisiting the father’s attack upon her. Fitzgerald gestures toward a “death bed scene,” the height of nineteenth-century sentiment’s literary affect, but the scene he creates is so stripped of sympathy as to be grotesque. The bleak outrage on the part of ­Nicole is registered toward the husband who has betrayed her for Rosemary’s sake. The sentimental contract of a reader’s heart going out to the heroine is thwarted and defamiliarized through Book One’s narrative concealment of prior signification. ­Nicole demands privacy, also from sentimental narrative. The integrity of her own body once irrevocably lost is what she helplessly tries to reclaim here: “it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world” (112). “Intrude” marks Dick as analogous to the sexually aggressive father, linked here to the lie of Daddy’s Girl. Fitzgerald’s positive description of Rosemary is that she triumphed after having been “intruded upon by the vulgarity of the world” (69). Thus Fitzgerald pointedly equates Dick with that vulgarity; he is the intrusion of violence, blood, and sexuality. Dick’s repeated “Control Yourself !” is a deflected cry of “control this sentimental narrative!” and a hopeless charge to police autonomic affect while admitting that the sentimentalist has “lost control” of it. Sedgwick writes of a modernist aesthetic “according to which sentiment inheres less in the object fig­ured than in a prurient vulgarity associated with figuration itself ” (166), one that Fitzgerald senses is deeply within him, as well as in his readership, and which ­Nicole instinctively links to the patriarchy that intrudes yet again by surveilling and managing her hysteria. The conclusion to Book One of Tender is almost a textbook case of an invasion of privacy, a violating intimacy; as ­Nicole grimly knows, “it’s [always] you!” (112), or, conceived as a pointed injunction to the putative sentimental reader or writer: “who told you you could read (or write) this!” ­Nicole’s past has always determined her future; the madness catches up to itself diachronically at a moment sentiment begins to fail utterly. Fitzgerald squarely calls sentiment into question for both characters and reader by abandoning it here.24 ­Nicole remains a hysterical mystery to the reader at the end of Book One. For readers, ­Nicole enacting her hysteria yields a collapse to which we have no sentimental access and a dramatic present for which we have no epiphany. When ­Nicole says, “don’t come in the bathroom . . . dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them” (112), she is retreating to a damaged private space of presocial solitude, unintelligible to the reader. Sentiment’s universal core of feeling is generated in response to suffering. To strip sentiment’s devices and environments in such a bleak conclusion through chaotic affect after Book

Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment / 41

One’s range of suggestive sentimental scenes was a pointed act by Fitzgerald, but he never stinted on relentlessly exposing sentiment’s failures. The existent needs of his own nature and sensibility were to be inside and outside his created scenes simultaneously: to be included, to seek the “rarer” atmosphere, to be “whole-­souled,” but also to label and excoriate the “vicious.” These were all parts to be fitted into sentiment’s powerful anagram in Tender Is the Night. For Dick Diver to sentimentally protect the girl-­child actress and her aura over ­Nicole’s primary experience of affect is to be complicitous with sentiment in its perceived role in modernity as a cover-­up. His action signifies the beginning of the end of his judgment even before the reader of Tender Is the Night can parse out the full dimensions of his role as sentimental caretaker.

Conclusion Dick Diver’s conundrum becomes clear: how to extend sympathy and sustain intimacy with one who has been abused by a barbarous touch? The answer is through a repeated staging of her father’s violation; this is a grim paradox of the marriage bed that refracts ­Nicole’s trauma. Fitzgerald consistently works through this paradox in the major sentimental scenes of Book One in Tender Is the Night. Sentiment’s versatility functions in such non-self-coincidence in the curved space or gap, which describes how you look to me with me inscribed in you or how I look to you with you inscribed in me; for example, it describes how the party looks to the Diver dinner guests refracted through their need for Ameri­can community or how the battlefield cemetery is seen during Dick’s lecture by skeptical Abe and adoring Rosemary and how Dick needs to see it as both a sentimental and romantic narrative. How the Gold Star Mothers define Dick’s strong yearning for maternal sympathy and mourning and are refracted by ­Nicole and Rosemary, while he remains in the gap between them. Finally, Tender’s central refraction is how Dick Diver’s psychological perception looks to Fitzgerald, the reader, and to himself when Devereux Warren is always inscribed in him.25 Fitzgerald brilliantly lodges sentiment’s intimations in characters, where they come to believe in their subjective emotional responses rather than glean the feeling they are “played” within a dynamic. However, the significant scenes of sentimental response and narrative framing in Book One of Tender do not fully explain the interior world of Fitzgerald’s sentimental imaginary and the intimate wellsprings of his instinctive anxious need for sympathy and love which Chapter 2 will now explore.

2 Replacing the Dead Sisters Fitzgerald’s Narrative Incorporations of Sentimental Mourning Is there a loss that cannot be thought, cannot be owned or grieved, which forms the condition of possibility for the subject? —Judith Butler The Psychic Life of Power

In 1936 in Esquire, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children. . . . I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer” (“Author’s House” 184). Fitzgerald’s ­writerly intimation about the deaths of his two baby sisters, ages one and three, provides a revealing context for analyzing the emotional tenor of his fictional ethic through the displacements and compensations of psychiatrist Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, who was “born several months after the death of two young sisters” (203).1 While paternal incest victim ­Nicole Warren Diver is the nominal patient of rec­ord in Tender, the equally important case study is that of Doctor Diver. An analy­sis of the “two sisters” images countenancing Dick’s early life and possible trauma tells us much about Fitzgerald’s sentimental need—described by critics over the decades as everything from “chivalric” to “androgynous” to “patriarchal”—to seduce, love, save, and regulate all the women in his life and fiction. The “two sisters” cluster of images and their vari­ous permutations in Tender underwrite a recurring pattern of his “heart going out” to the “women” under his “care” (69, 185, 191), which he alternately calls a “trick of the heart” and a “trick” (164, 216). The “two sisters” cluster vividly elaborates Fitzgerald’s paradoxical embracing and renunciation of sentiment in its many forms. Žižek in The Parallax View posits Lacan’s famous objet petit a as an object that is for the subject “the focus of [his] libidinal investment,” “what is in you more than yourself ” (18). That perspective in Tender yields the two sisters reanimated everywhere in the text as stand-­ins and emblems, beginning with Rosemary Hoyt

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and continuing with ­Nicole Warren as the damaged daddy’s girl. Within the two versions of Tender (1934, 1951), which Žižek briefly cites as a first example of parallax, he references the two stories of Freud’s early seduction theory set against his revision into a patient’s fantasy production. With Devereux Warren’s rape of ­Nicole as a key example, Žižek writes of “facts loaded into the space of ‘too soon’ and ‘too late.’” This space of “indeterminacy” describes a moment when the abused child is “origi­nally helpless, thrown into the world when she is unable to take care of [her]self—that is, his or her survival skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter with the sexualized other always, by a structural necessity comes ‘too soon’” (20). To analogize, the Fitzgerald/Diver sisters are helpless, taken by illness, and then Dick himself battens against their memory and the grief in the Diver family. This concept is apparent in ­Nicole Warren, who is violently initiated into sex by her father “too soon” without “survival skills.” The sexualized encounter always comes “too soon” while the sentimental “saving” comes “too late” for Dick and his charm; he is born into the gap between nurture and grief. Scott Fitzgerald and Dick Diver are replacement children—if not literally then in family structure—for the two sisters. ­Nicole Warren is the replacement lover for her mother in the father’s bed. Dick is the doctor then required to wed, bed, and treat the mental patient, herself a replacement for Z ­ elda Sayre Fitzgerald who threatened and also sadly gave Scott a line of narrative intent to complete this very novel. Thus the “gap” between the Rosemary and ­Nicole versions of Tender—or rather the two sisters and the Z ­ elda versions—creates the narrative task of mourning the two sisters congruent with the ­Nicole story. Saving her must also model saving them, which can extend to Dick Diver saving everyone in his orbit. In a narrative sense, the two sisters trauma prepares Dick for ­Nicole’s trauma, as Fitzgerald richly explores both his earliest memories and his present crisis. The quandary about structuring the novel through a flashback is perhaps Fitzgerald’s acknowledgment of where the ­Nicole material must begin: in his earliest anxieties that “make him a writer” and with the illness and writing of ­Zelda, which challenges him as husband and writer during Tender’s imagining. The gap within which the parallax of the two tales resounds yields a sentimental circulation in which the logic of the content reveals itself and becomes the “form” of Tender Is the Night. The deeply suggestive primal scene that overdetermines Fitzgerald’s and Dick Diver’s early childhood provides an intimate way into understanding Tender’s most prominent patient and “case.”2 Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald’s fictional testament to the psychic imperatives of “saving the two sisters,” which drove his career-­long signature mode of anxious moral sentiment in narration and characterization.

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The Rhythms of Mourning Neither in Tender Is the Night nor in Fitzgerald’s fictional oeuvre is the underlying tragedy of the two dead infants squarely addressed, nor according to Freud and his interpreters would one logically expect it to be. Analogous famous literary careers and classic sentimental texts are firmly hinged on similar births and deaths. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, herself the young mother of two daughters who died in infancy, had survived the death in childbirth of her powerful feminist writer-­mother Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 to write Frankenstein (1816), perhaps the most classic text of guilty child survival and rage for nurturing. The fact that Jean Jacques Rousseau’s mother died at his birth sent him on a life-­long narrative quest for a sublimated maternal love that he specifically conflates with sexual desire in The Confessions (1781) and that mightily contributed to his sentimentalism. Such an imaginary can be seen as in part predicting a Scott Fitzgerald or a Dick Diver, a sentimental “monster” and surviving son, balancing whole-­ souled and vicious appeals to his sympathetic nature and of­ten incapable of finding a difference between them. Such traumatized lives and compulsions can be addressed through an application of Freud’s questing after a primal scene imaginary in much of his theorizing about human memory and its evasions. Ned Lukacher has constructed a sophisticated narrative definition of what this primal scene could signify as “an ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between his­tori­cal memory and imaginative construction” (24). What Fitzgerald imagines in Dick’s continual anxious sympathy is a deep mourning that cannot end, that practices concealment of its origins by paying tribute over and over again to the melancholy needs of the doctor-­hero. Fitzgerald in Tender rewrites the female victims in the novel and in his life as the melodrama of Doctor Diver: ­Nicole as paternal incest victim, the dying “eczema woman” patient, ­Zelda Fitzgerald as schizophrenic, the two dead Fitzgerald sisters. Contemporary readers might gauge Dick’s compulsive courting and care of younger women as stopping just short of the crime committed by ­Nicole’s pedophilic father. Yet while such a criticism is possible, I wish to explain the pattern’s origins and significance for Fitzgerald and for male sentiment, not justify or contest the vision of the male melodrama that the pattern exemplifies. To metaphorically save the two sisters, Dick Diver must effectively recall them to life and sustain them in repeated sentimental patterns. ­Nicole is always Tender’s first lost young woman, born to herself only when she becomes the object of Dick’s sole regard in progressive images: ­Nicole “smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world” (134); she is born to herself, yet trailing death. Fitzgerald writes that “Dick wished that she had no b­ ackground,

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that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come” and that he imagined the young ­Nicole as “minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her, out of the willow trees, out of the dark world” (135– 36), out of nothing, perhaps a death, a prebirth, into a sweetness as life. Dick also imagines “the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips” (149), uncannily driving the Gold Star Mothers down into ­Nicole and animating her. Finally, ­Nicole woos Dick, “new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant” (155). Most of­ten, ­Nicole is already lost to herself and to Dick, needing his constant belief and animation “for always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it” (180). Judith Butler in Gender Trouble has constructed a seminal argument for what she calls “the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame” by referencing Freud’s seminal essays in The Ego and the Id (1923) and “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). I address Butler’s larger framework in my discussion of Dick Diver’s homosocial pressures and affiliations in Chapter 3. Here it’s important to note that what Freud called “incorporation,” the ego’s taking on of the lost “other” and the sustaining of that felt memory “through a specific act of identification,” is the manner in which “love escapes annihilation” (Freud qtd. in Butler Gender Trouble 73–74). Within a resentful masochism, Dick Diver represents and reprises all the caregiving and nurturing roles that are required from him both personally and professionally. Dick is always “paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated” (91) in roles he is “condemned” to act on in real time. In Tender, the ego ideal regulates the doctor who has become the nurse, the son who has become the mother, and the brother who is seeking the love that the two sisters would have claimed. These roles are forged within the interior psychic space of mourning. Lacking the mother, the primal state that cannot be regained, Dick of­ ten conflates her with the actual lost sisters and carries them everywhere as ghost egos. When ­Nicole Warren soothes her father after her incestuous violation by “freezing up” and intoning “Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. Never mind” (129), we can hypothesize that here, as in several key junctures in Tender, Fitzgerald is transposing what Dick Diver might say to comfort his own mother in her grief over the loss of her daughters, his two baby sisters. The need to comfort, to save, to seduce, and to become—the fundamental and refracting urges in sentimental identification—are all fiercely present in Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald is compelled to do this through the creation of a powerful sympathetic and synthetic relation to the feminine, a conflicted relation to the maternal, an identification with the sisters, and a constant need for control. In Tender Is the Night, the nominal maternal space is repeatedly voided by Fitz-

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gerald: Dick and ­Nicole’s mothers are dead by the opening of the novel, an Ameri­ can movie starlet’s mother (Rosemary’s mother Elsie Speers) is a cool appraiser of her daughter’s potential, and ­Nicole herself, because of early sorrow, is incapable of a true emotional response to her own children. Into this space where daughters need saving, where a father is already odious, Dick operates as the maternal presence and the professionalized therapeutic fig­ure. In a novel with the riveting abuse of a daughter by a father, the deflected and suggested drama through­out is of a mother and son and of the psychic imperative to bring forth in transmuted narrative moments and pairings the two dead sisters (daughters) that define the gulf between the mother and son. A temperamental need to inhabit many roles was defined by Fitzgerald in his Notebooks begun after 1932. He stated, “I am half-­feminine, that is my mind is. . . . My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds” (Mellow 36–37). Fitzgerald in Tender invoked the uncanny by having Dick Diver identify with the most sensitive and repressed part of his psychic armature, another self that had something happen to “him” (and perhaps in prior time to “her and to her”). His sympathetic impulses are predicated on his wishing to communicate “a relation of singularity with a mute past . . . of which the eternal infans is the fig­ure at the same time he is concealed therein” (Blanchot 71). This little mute being of whom we could have no true recollection is one who nonetheless may determine the self and for whom we sacrifice and build our narratives of sentimental incorporation.3 By initially focusing on the tension around the two sisters, I want to investigate Fitzgerald’s gnostic intimation of earliest childhood as shaping his writer’s destiny toward the sentimental subject and narrative viewpoint; I also want to identify Tender’s compulsions and compensations in Doctor Diver’s long regimen and crisis on sentiment’s behalf.

Book One: Animating the Sisters With the Gold Star Mothers, Rosemary, and ­Nicole in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald crafts a rich moment of his­tori­cal compression and emotional sweep; in such high sentimental conceptions he has no peer in modern Ameri­can letters. Mothers and fathers are dead, decadent, or mourning. The Ameri­can children must work out their psychic and sexual legacies for themselves. The drama focuses on one man, two women, and perhaps a brother and two (dead) sisters. Several patterns in the novel exist where the anxiety and tension surrounding the putative loss of the two sisters is fluidly recreated in different configurations in which, as Butler relates, “the self-­criti­cal attitudes of the melancholic [are] the internalization of a lost object of love.” The object or objects that are lost are “brought inside the ego” (61) or, as Dick concludes, his ego is “condemned to carry” them (Ten-

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der 245). Gregg Horowitz writes of Žižek delineating between “lack” and “loss” when he states that for Žižek, “the melancholic fails to acknowledge that the self is structured not by loss, but by lack for which any actual object is merely a mystified substitute.” Therefore “loss” becomes the lesser, still unbearable expression of a lack that has always been present—the thing “that only retrospectively comes to be called ‘Mother’” (Horowitz 166). The doubling of the two sisters as loss that replaces the lack of the mother begins in Tender with Rosemary and ­Nicole. In the guise of “saving,” Dick as father first patterns out the Warren sexual possession of ­Nicole and then doubles her with a compensatory seduction of ­Rosemary, younger and less fraught with early sorrow. Dick also functions as a (replacement) sister himself, since that is whom his mother would be mourning. Finally, he is a mother in constant demand for nurturing and protection while telling his other patients that all shall be well—crooning as an Ameri­can frontier mother perhaps “that there were no wolves outside the cabin door” (117). Rosemary is not just represented as young in the novel; she at times reverts toward infancy in Fitzgerald’s rhetoric. When Dick and Rosemary begin their seductive dancing around one another, he consistently discourages her from becoming serious about him by calling attention to her youth. The language removes her from the threshold of consent—she is, after all, eighteen in the novel—even though she “plays younger” on screen for Ameri­can audiences. When Rosemary contrives to get them into a hotel room alone, Dick, recovering his paternal attitude, intones, “when you smile . . . I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth” (64). Rosemary has told him she loves him and ­Nicole both; there’s little differentiation for her as they become parental fig­ures as well as objects of desire; she also equates Dick with her dead father. Fitzgerald’s text is always hyperaware that the “ghosts” of many people share the room with these two potential lovers. When Dick protests that he loves ­Nicole, Rosemary counters, “But you can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love mother and I love you—more. I love you more now” (65). Rosemary sees Dick not so much a seducer—Fitzgerald’s desiring imagination for her is never very strong—but rather as a compound parental fig­ure. She becomes exasperated and tells him, “Oh, don’t tease me—I’m not a baby,” but Dick continues to deflect her emotion, finally giving her a last speech before leaving: “‘Good night, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.’ He gave her two lines of hospital patter to sleep on. ‘So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too’” (66). Rosemary appears to have activated his sympathy and care rather than his desire through what becomes a deflected sibling incest fantasy. Dick’s cadences mime a mother’s wisdom for a daughter rather than a father’s angry prohibition. Dick’s words are laced with dia­logic accents, with a movie director’s hard judgment (“Let’s drop it out of the picture”),

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which provides a segue into a mix of doctor and mother/father-­speak (keep yourself for your true love; don’t let ‘daddy’ have his way with you), and concludes with an admission that he’s not being modern (“old fashioned”). ­Rosemary’s final impulse in the scene is “to devour him, [she] wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him” (66). Fitzgerald brilliantly describes her desire as infantile and without erogenous definition while fantasizing her power to absorb him. When Rosemary tells Dick, “Mother likes to help everybody—of course she can’t help as many people as you do,” Fitzgerald writes, “For the first time the mention of her mother annoyed rather than amused Dick. He wanted to sweep away her mother, remove the whole affair from the nursery footing upon which ­Rosemary persistently established it. But he realized that this impulse was a loss of control—what would become of Rosemary’s urge toward him if, for even a moment, he relaxed” (84–85). The “persistent footing of the nursery” relates to early childhood sexual traumas involving an infant’s knowledge of the mother and consequently of the world she empowers. We may posit Fitzgerald as the “wise baby” looking up at a grieving mother for some sign of life and love, wanting to make it right for her, for “them.” We also have Fitzgerald’s two “Ledger” entries about nursery affairs in his young life. He writes: “1900 Jan. His mother presented him with a sister who lived only an hour” and “1901 July His sister Annabel was born. His first certain memory is the sight of her howling on a bed” (Turnbull 8–9). Thus two more sisters beyond the dead Louise Scott and Mary Ashton come into the forefront of Fitzgerald’s consciousness, one sister’s death reinforcing his status as surviving child and brother, another sister grandiosely “presented” to him, which inaugurates “memory.” To sweep away “mother” and nursery is to cancel the pressure from his mother and two sisters altogether. To have ­Rosemary believe he is wonderful is to have a sister do so. Dick’s deep self-­ recognition as maternal here signifies that the novel is being ceded over to him as its recording sensibility, a major torch-­passing in Fitzgerald’s formal crafting of Tender’s narration. However, what is Dick beyond his performance in maternal drag? If he goes “off-­duty” in the nursery, where would we find him or he himself ? ­Nicole and ­Rosemary remain relatively inert in Book One as two sisters until Doctor Diver recalls them to life again and again. ­Nicole, ­Rosemary, and Mary North depend on Dick who provides “a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders” (83). Without him, they do not exist nor does he, for “at the first flicker of doubt . . . he evaporated before their eyes” (28) or, to reverse the polarities as Tender repeatedly does, they do not exist for him at all without his validation. They as “the sisters” are truly dead without him.

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Book Two: The Warren Sisters in Control Fitzgerald in Book Two of Tender Is the Night straightens the novel into a linear narrative that develops Dick’s initial encounters with ­Nicole, their marriage, and his regulation of her. To repeatedly invade her “privacy” is to animate her to herself, Dick, and the reader. Dick in Paris “broke in upon ­Nicole’s confusion before it could form” (166). Later at the Agiri Fair, her “confusion” is literally the “death” where she “rots” (190). She accuses Dick, “you wanted to live!” (192). Fitzgerald continues this set of images when he writes that if Baby Warren “had ever suspected the rotted old truth,” the real reason for ­Nicole’s illness, she had denied it, “shoving it back in a dusty closet “ (215). Baby’s denial is analogous to Dick’s childhood memory of when he hid the key to his mother’s silver “closet” (139). This matrix of “closet,” “key,” and “rot” always includes at least two of three major actors in Tender (Dick, ­Nicole, and Baby) and is familiarly that of Fitzgerald fluidly driving the psychic lives of the two Warren sisters and Dick into confluence. Book Two changes the focus from the “twinned” sisters of ­Nicole and ­Rosemary to the pair of Warren sisters: ­Nicole and her older sibling, Beth “Baby” Warren, a fig­ure aptly named in a text pressured by two very young sisters. When Dick first meets a teenaged ­Nicole, Fitzgerald writes, “She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.” ­Nicole’s “face light[s] up like an angel’s,” “the unknown yielded her up; Dick wished that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come.” She appears to Dick as “a scarcely saved waif of disaster” (134–36), a phrase that conjures up the image of a silent screen Pickford or Gish crossed with perhaps the image’s genesis—a sister called back from beyond. This signature death knell in his work is countered through personifying a threatened young female life that can be saved to manage his two sister anxiety.4 When Baby Warren enters the Tender narrative, she is called “sister” by ­Nicole and the reinforcement of baby and sister sounds through­ out their scenes. Dick “pick[s] out” the two [Warren] sisters in an Ameri­can-­flag tableaux: “they were poster-­like, formidable in their snow costumes, ­Nicole’s of cerulean blue, Baby’s of brick red” (171). Baby Warren is twenty-­five, “tall and confident . . . in the manner of tall, restless virgins” (150–51). As an emotionally stolid and imperious “baby,” she controls the Warren money and is positioned within Tender as the fig­ure who would determine Dick’s role as husband and ­clinician. As Dick comes into a Swiss hotel dining room, “they were waiting for him and incomplete without him. He was still the incalculable element” (150); almost like dolls on a shelf, they wait for Dick to animate them. The pattern by which Dick controls the two young women is nominally patriarchal in the extreme but so softcore as to be almost pre-­pubescent, as is so

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much of Fitzgerald’s sexual imaginary. Does the two sisters imaginary at the core of his sentimental self-­representation make it necessary to craft the incest plot in the first place? Such a plot was not dictated by years of false starts on Tender or by the facts and diagnoses of Z ­ elda’s relations with her father. To repeatedly reanimate vulnerable young women so they can be saved is one of sentiment’s major paradoxes, since it always involves possession and potential physical violation. Such is the curve of the masculine sentimental projection. For Dick to love ­Nicole and Rosemary as lost “sisters” is to imaginatively pleasure the psyche with transformed rhythms to a hypothetical “romantic” sibling incest. Fitzgerald of­ ten appears stunned by the fierce identification he has with young girls; he works through these moments by battling sympathy itself, repeatedly crafting scenes that ask whether masculine sentiment is sustaining or alternately degrading. Paradoxically, the paternal incest plot at the heart of the novel may be Fitzgerald’s screen masking the sibling recovery anxiety at the root of his imaginative life as an author, one that he intuited as incestuous and commingling with the dead. Thus the transparency by which Dick replaces Devereux Warren becomes quite complex for Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald can then have Dick “cover” in masculine roles as husband, father, and psychiatrist, his seducing and sympathetic roles, so that he may sentimentally narrate them to himself as psychic balm for his fears and lacks. When ­Nicole rushes to Lausanne upon finding out her father is lying near death in the “decadent” hotel, she arrives only to hear Dick’s nervous explanation that her father tried to walk off his “death-­bed—like an old clock” . . . that “gets going again”—which is exactly what Dick is trying to do with ­Nicole in his anxiety, repeated through­out the novel, to recall her (a dead sister?) to a heartbeat, to a life with him. The scene ends as “some one had brought a phonograph into the bar and they sat listening to “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” (252) from Broadway Melody of 1929 about wooden toys all coming on a holiday for the big wedding.5 Has Dick Diver saved the “painted doll” by marrying her and taking her away from Daddy? To punctuate such lifeless sterility, Fitzgerald depicted Baby Warren as “wooden and onanistic” (152), while Rosemary’s mother, Mrs. Elsie Speers, is described as a “eunuch” (163). Baby Warren and Mrs. Speers have nominal responsibility for the two “sisters,” ­Nicole and Rosemary, but they act more as booking agents with properties. Dick must report to both of them and declare his intentions, which, after all, are to mother the “two sisters,” in effect to replace the blown-­out center of Tender’s maternal nurture. Both Baby Warren and Mrs. Speers compliment him on his politeness and social grace; he instantly responds to both that it’s a “trick of the heart” (164), and “a trick” (216); in 1936, Fitzgerald comments that “fiction is a trick of the mind and heart” (“Afternoon of an Author”). “Fiction” and “sympathy” cluster with “tricks,” “heart,” and the two sisters as rhetorical units consistently distributed in the text to work through

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what Mary Poovey would call a “structural psychoanalytic methodology” (19). To turn these “tricks” can of­ten be an act of considerable self-­disgust to Dick and to Fitzgerald—nowhere more evident than when “mothers” such as Baby and Mrs. Speers “out” him as the perfect man who displays virtues associated with the feminine and punctuates writing as his root sentimental act.

The Cary Sisters and the Fitzgerald Sisters Such a pattern of working through mother-­and-­sister(s) anxieties is made clearer by a brief look at some of Fitzgerald’s short fiction. In June 1936, Fitzgerald wrote the following to his sister Annabel after their mother had a stroke: “It was sad taking [Mother] from the hotel, the only home she knew for fifteen years to die— and to go thru her things. . . . Louisa’s dolls in tissue paper, old letters and sou­ venirs”; he then added, “when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her and how she clung to the end to all things that would remind her of moments of snatched happiness. So I couldn’t bear to throw out anything” (Turnbull 281); he never has, for here he even appears to acquire her keepsakes. To read this letter is to see Fitzgerald’s understanding of their mother, sensing in her patterns he deeply shared. The baby sister’s dolls reverberate as what she “clung” to and perhaps what he did, too, as in his defiant statement of “clinging” to male “innards” after “absorbing” all personalities within himself, the male act of self-­preservation without becoming female. “Turning him inside out” would reveal the impacted “two sisters” story in Tender, like the dolls in tissue (writing?) paper. Fitzgerald appears to have internalized this moment to form a base for two stories, “Author’s House” and “An Author’s Mother,” published in Esquire in July and Sep­tem­ber of 1936, respectively. “Author’s House” contains Fitzgerald’s quote about how after the death of his two sisters, he “started then to be a writer” (184). That perception occurs in the house’s basement, in effect the writer’s subconscious where it is first lodged. The cellar is “everything I’ve forgotten—all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman and a soldier” for “fiction is a trick of the mind and heart composed of as many separate emotions as a magician uses in executing a pass or a palm. When you’ve learned it you forget it and leave it down here” (184). “An Author’s Mother” is suffused with an aged mother’s wistful longing for her favorite nineteenth-­century sentimental poetry, while her author son is largely effaced from her memory as she dies of the effects of a stroke. The story is a sad and sentimental benediction on her and her son’s miscomprehensions of each other. In uncanny fashion, Fitzgerald becomes as explicit about the power of the two sisters as he was ever to be in his short fiction. In “An Author’s Mother,” Mrs. John-

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ston is an elderly lady shopping for her author-son’s birthday. She wants to give him a bathrobe but then thinks about a book: “of course if her son could have been an author like Longfellow, or Alice and Phoebe Cary, that would have been different, but she did not even remember the names of who wrote the three hundred novels and memoirs that she skimmed through every year” and “her mind kept returning persistently to the poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary” (156). She asks a library clerk if he has a book of the Cary Sisters’ poems. Then she faints and is taken to a hospital where she’s asked the name of her nearest relative, but she can’t quite summon it up. She repeats vaguely that her son will write about her accident but mixes up that fact with the doctor who wants to suture a cut she has suffered. She insists that her son is an author, not a “suture.” Here Fitzgerald conflates a novelist son with a “suture,” perhaps a most suitable noun to describe a replacement child who would close a deep wound involving dead sisters. Mrs. Johnston concludes, “well, don’t disturb my son John or my son-­in-­law or my daughter that died or my son Hamilton who—”; then she remembers “the only book she knew really in her heart” and “announced astonishingly” “my son, Hamilton who wrote ‘The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary.’” Mrs. Johnston then expires and the doctor “would never have guessed it was that Alice and Phoebe Cary had come to call upon her, and taken her hands, and led her back gently into the country she understood” (156–59). That country of sentimental poetry was also the Ameri­can world before the two little Fitzgerald girls died; it is the Victorian world of sentiment before Fitzgerald himself was born. These poems (these sisters or daughters) come to lead her into rest.6 Why would Fitzgerald choose Alice and Phoebe Cary as perhaps his own moth­er’s last literary friends and comfort? Sisters Alice (1820–1871) and Phoebe (1824–1871) were life-­long companions and fellow poets who grew up outside Cincinnati, Ohio, and later lived for many years in New York City where Alice was a tireless working writer. Their joint poetic works were published to popu­ lar acclaim by Rufus Griswold in his The Female Poets of North America (1848). They were successful sentimental poets in the mourning and grief culture of Victorian America, while Alice Cary also carved a significant niche as a realistic writer about the midwest­ern frontier through her two volumes of Clovernook Sketches in the 1850s. What may have interested Fitzgerald beyond his mother’s possible affinity for their poetry would have been that the two writer-­sisters lived together and never married, were suspended in their sisterhood, and died several months apart. The “sisterly” statistics in the Cary sisters’ lives are almost overwhelming. Judith Fetterley states that Alice Cary’s fiction records a motherless universe in which parents do not provide affection or support and that Alice Cary never recovered from the death of a gifted sister Rhoda who died in 1833 and taught Alice the art of storytelling (Fetterley, “Alice Cary” 2597). In 1837, Alice the oldest child still at home, was in charge of the Cary house and four sur-

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viving younger siblings; another sister Lucy had died at age three in the same epidemic that killed Rhoda. By 1855, Alice Cary was established enough as a writer that she and Phoebe moved to a house in New York on E. 20th St. that she eventually purchased and lived in till her death. She set up a household and salon of sorts, which included Phoebe and another younger sister, Elmina, and two servants, themselves sisters (Fetterley xv, xviii). Cary wrote stories that included titles such as “The Sisters,” “The Sister,” and “Two Sisters,” which feature orphans, sisters forced into sad life choices, and a sister who dies as consequence of a jealous mother’s cruelty (Fetterley xiv, xix).7 “Orphaned as we are,” Cary writes, “we have need to be kind to each other—ready with loving and helping hands and encouraging words, for the darkness and the silence are hard by where no sweet care can do us any good” (“The Sisters” 64). They experience what Joanne Dobson calls an “existential orphanhood,” a sentimental separation “whether temporal or eternal” (267). Such a syndrome fits Dick Diver’s sadness, which he laces with blessings such as “we must all try to be good” (Tender 185). Alice and Phoebe Cary died within months of each other, as had Louise Scott and Mary Ashton Fitzgerald. They comprised a sort of family time capsule of memory with no issue, one which Fitzgerald appropriated to have the distracted and dying author’s mother for one final time blot our her son, the writer, and wish him a (Cary) sister. The Cary sisters finally embody sister Louisa’s dolls, which Fitzgerald unwraps and notes in his letter to Annabel after he cleans out their mother Mollie’s apartment.8 In the remainder of Book Two, after the mad scenes at the Agiri Fair, Dick begins to sense the end of his sentimental merging with ­Nicole. For Fitzgerald, the imperatives of saving the two sisters—once so integral to controlling his sympathy and sensuality—now become external emblems, almost mocking the imaginative pattern of the first half of the novel. At the clinic, Dick asks an English woman patient when she will play the piano for them. When she demurs, claiming she “plays only so-­so,” Fitzgerald writes, “They knew she did not play at all— she had two sisters who were brilliant musicians but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been young together” (182). The “brilliant” sisters drove her to silence and illness, her “notes” unplayed, rather than “making” her an author-­manque for Fitzgerald.9 Dick is also immediately accused of having seduced a daughter “who had been at her mother’s side” while she had been a clinic patient (187). After Dick is informed of Abe North’s death in New York, Tommy Barban and one Prince Chillicheff are on the way to have dinner with “two daughters” of an old flame of the Prince’s. The Prince tries to “arrange” something with them for Dick who “hastily” says no. Prince Chillicheff becomes a ­Devereux Warren procuring for Dick, providing yet another chance for him to seduce/save a young girl (sister) or two; Dick passes on the offer. Dick Diver is “born several months after the death of two young sisters” and

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his father, having “guess[ed] what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide” (203). The only further mention of Dick’s mother is that her “small fortune belonged to [her] son and paid for his whole education at Yale and Johns Hopkins. Dick is thus underwritten by a mother’s money, as he will be by Baby Warren’s purchase of him and a clinic for ­Nicole. Dick’s father, a minister of little life force, has been raised by “two proud widows” to believe in “courtesy and courage” (204)—two more female sisters for Diver’s imaginary.10 His father also relates only one anecdote, that of coming to a new town as an ordained minister and instinctively moving across a crowded room to introduce himself to his “gray-­haired woman” hostess: “after that I made many friends in that town” (204). Dick’s father bonds with a Victorian mother, exactly the role he has assumed in Dick’s life. The pattern is suggestive: separate the son from the potentially grieving mother and become her while the real mother’s legacy will pay the bills. When Dick returns to Europe after his father’s burial, Fitzgerald portrays him increasingly going through the motions of performing care. He “picks up” a “lost and miserable family of two girls and their mother in the bus from the hotel” in a stopover in Naples and “an overwhelming desire to help or be admired came over him: he showed them fragments of gaiety” and “pretended they were this and that . . . falling in with his own plot” (206). Dick muses, “Well, you never knew how much space you occupied in people’s lives” (207). This is a fundamental Fitzgerald anxiety that goes back to his primal scene imaginary with the grieving and hence “absent” mother: the answer, then, is not enough space, never enough space. Dick expresses his compromised union with ­Nicole most strongly when he is beaten and arrested in Rome at the end of Book Two. Dick drunkenly concludes, “I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-­year old girl. Maybe I did” (235). This speech yields Dick sense that he is both Devereux Warren and death-­haunted. A sister, Baby Warren, “waiting with a doctor in a taxi-­cab,” now assumes control over a badly beaten and diminished Dick “for as long as he proved to be of any use” (235). Dick Diver—and Fitzgerald—move into Book Three of Tender Is the Night bereft of a positive sentimental imaginary animating the many emblems of the two sisters.11

Book Three: The Sisters Fragmented As Dick winds down toward losing ­Nicole and his vocation, Tender’s specter of the “two sisters” fluidly meets him everywhere, punctuating his inability to save himself and skewing his emotional response. Fitzgerald orchestrates a collapse of Dick’s sustaining sentimental imaginary. When the Divers visit Mary North Minghetti, newly married to a Middle East­ern magnate, a gravely comic misunderstanding ensues about two women attendants who turn out to be sisters of Mary’s

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husband and are deeply insulted by Dick’s treatment of them as family servants in the “affair of the dirty bathwater” in a cross-­cultural and racial breakdown between the two families. As Mary in consternation informs Dick and ­Nicole, the sisters are “consecrated” to Minghetti as “Himadoun.” When the oldest male mem­ ber of the family marries, the two oldest sisters become ladies-­in-­waiting to his wife (263). To have two living sisters indentured in such a way is a skewed parallel to Dick’s two dead “older” sisters, “consecrated” by him through Fitzgerald’s transference to the mystical apprehension that they “served” his talent as a writer. Dick can’t “see” these “Asian” Minghetti sisters or understand their role and he forgets what he is told about them. A sec­ond fragmented parallel to the two sisters imaginary comes when ­Nicole and Tommy Barban are about to make love for the first time in a Monte Carlo hotel. They hear an “increasing clamor” below their room and open the shutters where Tommy only sees “two women on the balcony . . . talking about weather and tipping back and forth in Ameri­can rocking-­chairs” (295). Tommy and ­Nicole begin again, whereupon a raucous pair of Ameri­can girls race into their room to wave at the soldiers in the Ameri­can fleet pulling out below the hotel window in the harbor. One girl tears off her “pink step-­ins” to wave as a flag. This bizarre intrusion by two girls “young, thin and barbaric, unfound rather than lost” (297) suggest pallid and faint ghosts orphaned from Dick’s care. Two mature women (sisters?) then morph into the two Ameri­can girls in sexually explicit modernity. In Monte Carlo, the girls scream out “Charlie, look up!” and “He don’t see me” as, indeed, Dick is not there to see them. With Tommy, ­Nicole has literally escaped Dick’s imaginary: “her ego began blooming like a great rich rose as she scrambled back along the labyrinths in which she had wandered for years” (289)— as “unfound” as the two lost Fitzgerald-­Diver girls, perhaps? Fitzgerald limns ­Nicole’s soul in transit; there are hints of the occult in her coming alive in contrast to the inertia of the two (dead) sisters: “Why, I’m almost complete. . . . I’m practically standing alone without him,” she believes, “like a happy child” (289). Earlier at the Agiri Fair during ­Nicole’s breakdown, the two narratives of Tender Is the Night—animating the two sisters and managing ­Nicole’s trauma—begin to come together. When Dick says that they as a family are going home, ­Nicole “roars . . . Home! . . . And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box I open” (187, 190). Is this what was intuited in the Fitzgerald household: the ashes of the two little Fitzgerald girls rotting everywhere? Fitzgerald perhaps uncannily touches the heart of the two sisters narrative and the death drive to get back to them. Dick’s decline also includes a frantic centering on his own children: “­Nicole saw Dick peer about for the children among the confused shapes and shadows of many umbrellas . . . she looked at him with detachment, and decided that he was

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seeking his children, not protectively but for protection” (280). The last scene of the two sisters’ imaginary in Tender is also the most skewed. Mary Minghetti and Lady Caroline Sibly-­Biers dress as male sailors and cruise the waterfront in Antibes, picking up “two silly girls” before making a “rotten scene in a lodging house” (303–04). Dick is called to bail them out, reworking Baby’s bailing him out of jail in Rome at the end of Book Two. Here, for the last time, Dick is on duty for the two sisters but they are a cross-­dressed pair of matrons, playing at being naughty. Their French girl “conquests” double the amount of girls to four, two pairs of seducing and seduced “sisters” in a drag scene rivaling for Fitzgerald anything in Hollywood’s gendered nonsense. In his final helping role, Dick sentimentally recalls, “it had early become a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment when he had realized that he was the last hope of a decaying clan” (302, emphasis mine). To rewrite his errand in this fashion as lonely male heroism punctuates how powerfully the image of the two sisters may have determined this sentimental male role. Dick ends his musing with ­Nicole as Ophelia (see Chapter 5), a “sweet poison” he had willingly drunk (302) as Fitzgerald crafts a final cover story asking for an extension of sympathy, for a reader’s heart: “Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved” (302). Book Three thus concludes Fitzgerald’s roster with indentured Islamic sister attendants, coarse Ameri­can girls following the fleet, and cross-­dressed sailor “boys.” The whole-­ souled vision of the sisters’ rescue is carried through in a burlesque without sentiment. Fitzgerald’s two sisters plot in Tender Is the Night finally collapses around his sentimental needs for seduction and sympathy.

Elsie Speers and Mary North: Mothers and the Two Sisters Imaginary If an imaginary involving two sisters underwrites Fitzgerald’s instinctive embodiment of sentiment’s relational power of sympathy, then how is the mother represented in a text that assiduously kills off its mothers to give space to Dick Diver’s maternal ministerings? Two candidates for shadow maternal presences in Tender are Rosemary’s mother, Elsie Speers, and Mary North, always the third woman in the Diver text. If Elsie Speers functions stolidly for both Rosemary and Dick as the pragmatic enabling mother, Mary North ultimately questions his failure in all his roles. To have Rosemary report on Dick (or Dick on Rosemary) to her mother, Elsie Speers, is like a report of a sister to Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald. ­Rosemary has functional roles for Fitzgerald that install her in the novel’s production. Her mother tells her, “You were brought up to work—not especially to marry” and “Put whatever happens down to experience” (40). Elsie Speers’ charge to her daughter may be Fitzgerald’s author’s pun: write it out, you’re the boy, the writer. Economically Rosemary is a boy (a brother, perhaps), not a sister and thus

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should “write,” or, alternately, seduce Dick Diver or be seduced. Fitzgerald crafts a complex incestuous role-­changing transvestiture with stand-­ins for all the characters in the Fitzgerald personal drama in Tender Is the Night. If Fitzgerald conceived of himself as something of a replacement sister/author, then the device of ­Rosemary allows him to write Book One. ­Nicole’s stream-­of-­consciousness summary story of the early years of the Diver marriage (1919–25) is bracketed by two interviews: Dick and Baby Warren (158– 59) and Dick and Mrs. Speers (162–65). The subjects are ­Nicole and ­Rosemary, respectively: two “sisters,” two “mothers,” and Dick explaining himself twice as prospective husband and lover. Dick confesses a love of Rosemary to her mother, and says Rosemary is in fact “her persona . . . the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical” (164). Fitzgerald may certainly be revealing himself here as the “Irish romantic” to the calm “detached” mother, as he and Mrs. Speers sit in the Café des Alliees (162). Most relevant from Elsie Speers may be her view that “‘Rosemary’s had crushes but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me—’ Mrs. Speers laughed, ‘—for dissection,’” for “There was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you” (163, emphasis mine).12 As Fitzgerald may have transposed the statement, so was Dick conditioned to be in love with the sisters before, or rather having never seen them. Elsie Speers’ dialogue with Dick refracts off the romantic and sentimental surfaces of narrative and biological ghosts in the Fitzgerald imagination. Fitzgerald intimates Rosemary’s own utilitarian role when she entreats Dick to “take” her: “Oh, please go on, whatever they do—I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to” (64). Here is an example what Žižek calls aphanisis, the self-­erasure of the subject when she approaches her fantasy too closely (The Plague of Fantasies 175). Dick responds that “this is not as it should be” and “you’re a fetching kid,” and the seduction of a sister has been forestalled; Fitzgerald could then write his sentimental text of “saving.” The combined workings of the Rosemary and ­Nicole plots salve the Fitzgerald imperative to link his earliest psychic intimations with his present-­tense marriage tragedy in 1932–1934.13 Mary North survives Abe North, the All-­Ameri­can alcoholic artist, marries “dark” (Hosain Minghetti), and samples “gay” life (cavorting as a sailor boy with Lady Caroline). She “preserve[s] her individuality through men,” as do ­Nicole and Rosemary (53). Dick cracks that if Europe goes Communist “Mary North will turn up as the bride of Stalin” (259); he compares her ambition to that of an Anita Loos heroine (286). Her name associatively suggests the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary Todd Lincoln, the suffering wife of Abe, a survivor who lived on her nerves, unstable and shrill. Mary North, more than any other character in Tender, lives in a state of change and is not tethered to a past. She is first identified by Rosemary on the beach as “a tanned woman with very white

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teeth” (5) and later at Dick’s party as having a “face so merry that it was impossible not to smile back into the white mirrors of her teeth” (34); a sunnier, reflecting vagina dentata cannot be imagined. Mary is a true chameleon of skewed energy and hopefulness. She too is lightly under Dick’s spell in a final encounter between them on the terrace above the beach where Baby and ­Nicole—the two sisters—watch from below. In their last bitter interview, Mary accuses Dick of ultimately making people feel worse and of cutting himself off from nourishment. He counters, “Have I been nourished?” (313), the truthful query at narrative’s end of Dick’s long regimen and its defeat. When Mary herself scolds him as “self-­ indulgen[t],” Fitzgerald makes Dick both plaintive and vulnerable: “[Dick’s] eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman” (313). Here, the only infant son in the world confronts the only mother. Fitzgerald’s sentence is cleanly bifurcated into a plea for maternal nurturing and the compensatory seduction of the female by the male—the twin dramas of Dick Diver’s emotional odyssey. While Mary scolds Dick in the last interview, she also flirts with him: “I always thought you knew a lot. . . . More about me than any one has ever known” as “their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together.” However, Dick cuts off the momentary union, “as the laughter inside him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary might hear it” (314). If their dialogue is recast into that of a mother and son, the ironies multiply. Dick’s reaction would not be laughter toward his all but moribund charm, but rather this is Fitzgerald acknowledging that he’s vamping the mother in the text with no sisters or go-­betweens.14 “Glances” marrying, bedding, and straining finally cast the relationship as that of mother and son; in the end, Dick and his mother (Mary) supplant father Devereux and ­Nicole Warren in the incest imaginary. Dick toys with Mary in barbed lines that can be read in a maternal register between mother and son:



“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked. “Liked you—I loved you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking——” “There has always been something between you and me.” She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?” “Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” (314)

The dialogue from Dick and Fitzgerald’s point of view might go something like this: troubles such as mourning my two dead sisters before my birth? And I made you feel better about yourself because of the sisters, made everyone feel better, needing to be “kind and good” to win love. But, have I been nourished [mother], through

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my sympathetic and seductive performances? Dick’s malicious burlesque with Mary suggests what women have always had with Dick is perhaps the “performance” of a primal scene imaginary between them. Such may be Fitzgerald’s coded harsh dramatization of his position in the family romance, which provided the complex and resentful sentimental engine to drive his fiction.

Conclusion Žižek utilizes Tender Is the Night to describe a “complex literary case” of minimal difference at the beginning of The Parallax View.15 Žižek believes the only way to conceive the meaning of Tender—what he deems Fitzgerald’s “masterpiece”— is to read the novel’s two published versions synchronously; he believes that the “observational position,” the “truth of both of the versions, “simultaneously, if you will,” is “the traumatic core around which they circulate” (19). To put it in “Lacanese,” Žižek believes that “the subject’s gaze is always-­already inscribed into the perceived object itself in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than the object itself ’”; and “Sure, the picture is in my eye but me, I am also in the picture” (17). These are the basic conditions for a sentimental response, one that regards the other through the lens of self, which becomes a reciprocal relationship that satisfies both needs and desires. The fundamental motions of the sentimental are transacted within this “blind spot “ in the only ways in which we can know our own feelings. That core for Fitzgerald would be the two sisters narrative masked by the incest tale, the Fitzgerald girls woven into the representation of the “mad” Fitzgerald wife, with Rosemary leavened into ­Nicole’s tale, where nursing and “carrying the egos” become the analyst’s and novelist’s primary tasks. Dick Diver feels about friends and lovers that he is “only as complete as they were complete themselves” (Tender 245) in continual roles that display the pattern of his need. Within the gap in Tender’s “real” time—1917 to 1929—is the story of Tender told sentimentally: the saving, courting, seducing, and marrying of ­Nicole Warren and their simulation through the romance with ­Rosemary. Thus Fitzgerald creates in the gap of the two dead sisters by narrating the unrepresentable, as ­Nicole’s incest trauma is a blank narrated by her father-­ seducer, and the sisters are mute and unknowable as perfect children in the culture of grief and mourning where, as Dick Diver knows, it is “so easy to be loved, so hard to love” (245) in the parallax gap of sentiment.16 Fitzgerald constructed for Dick an entire armatured personality and character arranged for his psychic and emotional survival through which we must read for fig­ures of concealment and revelation. The pattern of Dick Diver’s long sentimental regimen in Tender Is the Night suggests that the compulsion to reimagine the two sisters was never far from Fitzgerald’s subconscious or his plot.

3 “So Easy To Be Loved— So Hard To Love” Sentiment, Charm, and Carrying the Egos If we are to have virtues we shall presumably have only such virtues as have learned to get along with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most fervent needs: very well, let us look for them within our labyrinths! —Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil “The best director in Hollywood—a man I never interfere with—has some streak in him that wants to slip a pansy into every picture or something on that order. Something offensive. He stamps it in deep like a watermark so I can’t get it out.” —Monroe Stahr in Fitzgerald The Love of the Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s producer Monroe Stahr sounds rather proud of his “director” here, who articulates something like a baseline of Fitzgerald’s imaginary. The best writer in Hollywood is what Fitzgerald himself may have wanted to be; he cannot “interfere” (coyly) with his own creative process. Stahr as a producer overseeing a picture appears at the mercy of his director’s subconscious; it’s the split for Fitzgerald between two powerful egos, the one where the producer “has all the keys” and knows “where everything” is (Tycoon 79) and the one where Dick Diver as director and performer in Tender Is the Night (1934) can only be complete through a gendered charm that “slips” into the picture (245). For a novel suffused with rare beauty in language and image, Tender Is the Night is also repeatedly “offensive” in scenes of an “esoteric burlesque” (Tender 6) where Fitzgerald conceived of “pansy” in an array of affects. In splitting his writerly self, Fitzgerald “stamped in” a personal sense of charm as it fueled his sentimental affiliations and responses, each novel then written over his signature “watermark” on the page. An indelible mark—perhaps sentiment itself—is perceived through narrative. If a Fitzgerald watermark is “stamped in deep,” where it’s deepest is in Book Three of Tender (245–52) where Dick Diver has revelations about the nature of charm and caregiving that come from his encounter with two gay males. Dick Diver sits on a hotel terrace in Lausanne, Switzerland, with Francisco de

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Real, a young gay Chilean, whose father has begged Dick to take his son on as a patient to “cure” him. Dick refuses the case but then projects himself into a reverie that cuts to the heart of Fitzgerald’s sentimental affiliations and their relation to a gendered self. Throughout his decade of drafts on Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald had been derisive and satirical in tone toward gays in overt cameo representations or in suggestive symbolic moments. Overtly hostile references to “fairies” had been expunged from the final manuscript of Tender. Nothing really prepares the reader for the serial unreeling of queering the text that ensues in Dick’s encounter with Francisco and the uncanny reappearance of Royal Dum­phry who announces the even more abrupt return of the dying Devereux Warren. The abusive father reintroduces a patriarchal incestuous authority just as Dr. Diver is hypothesizing a discursive regime that would tentatively establish a homosocial bond stamped in the watermark of both his ego structure and sympathetic imagination. What had begun as a psychiatrist interviewing a prospective patient shifts in two pages (245–46) to a full-­scale retreat from the specter of “gay” through that of “incest,” from an intimately felt sentimental bond to a return of the (incestuous) symbolic as a desperate censoring force that blocks the queer contagion. Fitzgerald’s particular blend of fraught masculinity is exposed as susceptible to and shaped by emotional investments that draw their power from what constitutes sentimentality for him and his characters through the circulation of a gendered energy that “press[es] up too close” (245). Dick Diver thinks that his interview with Francisco is “as close as he would ever come to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle” (245); Fitzgerald’s statement can stand for his own relation to homosocial sensibility and feeling as well. Fitzgerald crafts Dick as well inside the structure of sentiment’s reciprocal flow and his subjective response is already built into the transaction. As a caregiver, his patients are in extreme relation to their own deepest natures and most of­ten come with a devastating sexual script in relation to their family which demands not only his professional skill and his empathy but also his identification. Fitzgerald by the early 1930s was hovering on the periphery of psychiatry’s early hegemony in the West, paying ­Zelda’s sanitarium bills and attempting to manipulate her treatment and shape her writing. He was hoping against hope about her recovery, playing his sensibility off her doctors’ repeated questions about his own stability (see chapter 5), and analyzing himself through Dick Diver’s impulses and passages in Tender. Fitzgerald’s intimation was that his fictional authority arose from the sentimental, that he was best there, while at the same time he held the counter-­belief that the sentimental was “vicious” (69) as well as “whole-­souled” (57) and was cheapened through the “harlot’s mind” (69) of Hollywood. The sentimentalism, which is the closet of these conflicting impulses, is portrayed most powerfully in the extended private imagining about

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charm through Francisco. My strategy here will be, following Sedgwick, Butler, and Žižek, to ask how Fitzgerald’s characterizations work in the “enactments they are performing” in “projective chains of vicarious investment” (Sedgwick, Epistemology 27, 62) that probe the sentimental’s root premises for him as a novelist. As we have seen in an analy­sis of Fitzgerald’s posited imaginary of sympathy with his two (dead) sisters (Chapter 2) and through a close reading of sentimental scenes early in the novel (Chapter 1), Fitzgerald’s distinction between sympathy and seduction was always breaking down. There were few boundaries for him amongst bodies, egos, wants, and needs. Traditional criticism on Tender Is the Night has always portrayed Dick Diver as the romantic Ameri­can hero in decline in the modern novel.1 What I stress here is the gendered dynamic in the production of sentimental images that informs Dick’s sense of his heroism and final isolation. These heightened images and scenes make use of what Katherine Cummings calls a “feminine style” in constructing a “masculine defense” (279). In writing of nineteenth-­century Ameri­can male responses to feeling, Hendler, following Sedgwick, “treat[s] the experience of a sympathetic identification as the narrative and affective core of a sentimental structure of feeling” (11). That “defense” and “core” is pressured in Dick Diver by what in the family space marks incest as that regime’s “internal limit,” one which Foucault calls “an indispensable pivot” turning on an “obsession “ and an “attraction” (History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 109). Dick is always already marked by Devereux Warren’s rape of his daughter and doomed to follow that father’s role when he marries ­Nicole. Hendler (6), Fuss (93), and Ann Douglas (233) all cite Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) to the effect that identification is always a form of desire and object choice but is ambivalent and volatile as it can express the need “to replace” and to become by imaginative projection. Thus identification is a continual cycle of “wanting to be” and “to have” in which the subject sees the self reflected in a colonization “structurally indispensable to every act of interiorization” (Fuss 8, 10). At the apotheosis of parsing out his own sympathy in Book Three, Dick Diver is doubly marked as decadent and degenerate, toppled off sentiment’s pedestal and ruthlessly mired in his own self-­image as an extension of the father’s law, the symbolic.2 Fitzgerald transformed a conventional heterosexual male animus against gays in the early life of the Tender manuscripts into a central motif of Dick Diver’s troubled interior imagining. What has always looked like Fitzgerald’s more relaxed acceptance of his androgyny [“I am half-­feminine—that is, my mind is. . . . My characters are all Scott Fitzgeralds. Even the feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds” (Hearne 258)] is buttressed by a more complex response to gender in an undated Notebook entry: “When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I

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don’t want the man. I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own inards [sic]. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me” (#938, 146). Fitzgerald’s two responses taken together constitute perhaps the most fluid statements on gender among heterosexual male modernists. “I cling to my own innards” becomes an instinctive response protecting himself physically against violation, an opaque delineation between his sense of self and a gay sexuality that concludes with a compensatory masculine counter-­statement of bravado about the domination of women. Fitzgerald’s notebook entry underwrites an imperial signifier of the self. He found himself embattled in working out the implications of this self through his characters in his particular male melodrama by claiming an “absorptive” female emotional life within an aggressive dominant posture. These fictional moments drive Fitzgerald deep into his own desiring and sympathizing nature to tentatively queer Dick’s sentimental responses in order to describe them. Dick Diver identifies charm as the best part of his sentimental armature and Fitzgerald then deconstructs charm’s gendered hegemony. “Carrying the egos” with all its heroism, pathos, and self-­sympathy is the completion of Dick Diver’s unfinished sentimental business and romantic melancholia: “so easy to be loved— so hard to love” (245).

“Well if that isn’t a Pansy’s Trick!” Book One of Tender is dominated both by Dick Diver’s control of his Mediterranean world and Rosemary Hoyt’s perception of it. Dick functions as a script writer and director on the beach he has crafted while Hollywood’s Rosemary “takes direction” well and is totally responsive to his created worlds of beauty and taste. Dick is first seen by Rosemary on the beach, where “he moved about gravely with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face” (6). The oxymoronic “esoteric burlesque” itself internally argues between high-culture gloss and popu­lar form; it is a way to refract ritual motion into derisive imitation for the initiates. In Book One, Dick’s moves are unerringly correct to Rosemary as he dazzles and charms people. The first hint of something odd in the Diver performance occurs on his beach and includes ­Nicole’s agency in the scene’s production. Fitzgerald writes: Simultaneously the party moved toward the water, super-­ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourman­ dise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. The Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did

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not know that there would be another transition presently from the utter absorption of the Provencal lunch hour. But again she [Rosemary] had the sense that Dick was taking care of her, and she delighted in responding to the eventual movement as if it had been an order. ­Nicole handed her husband the curious garment on which she had been working. He went into the dressing tent and inspired a commotion by appearing in a moment clad in transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection revealed that actually they were lined with flesh-­colored cloth. “Well, if that isn’t a pansy’s trick!” exclaimed Mr. McKisco contemptuously—then turning quickly to Mr. Dum­phry and Mr. Campion, he added, “Oh, I beg your pardon.” Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. (21) The Diver “party” moves in the sensuous experience of heat and cold through ornate metaphors of food and drink as Rosemary “takes direction” from Dick as a good Hollywood soldier. ­Nicole then gives Dick his “costume” for the swim as if it and he were props. Tender then explodes into a camp visual with Dick suddenly in everyone’s gaze as the sexual object, both titillating and concealing. The dynamics of Tender that Hollywood might gloss with a tease and cover-­up are representations of the concealment of the Diver-­Warren relationship: the father as incestuous rapist-­seducer, Dick wearing “his garment” as part of the Warrens. The scene is also revelatory of Dick’s radically new role as an Ameri­can “priest” in the new sexual science; all of this is labeled by McKisco as a “pansy’s trick.” Dick is of­ten described as priestly; Fitzgerald suggests Dick as a St. Francis (91) and writes a notebook entry to the effect that he wanted Dick to be a “spoiled priest”; he’s also the son of a Protestant clergyman and takes “confession” from his patients. In the new Freudian science of the sexualized family romance, Dick is necessarily a “priest of the genitals” and ­Nicole has cut him a new pelvic version of the black and white clerical collar with black lace on flesh-­colored cloth. Such an evocative scene shows again Fitzgerald’s power to dramatize large mythic motions of not only his novel’s history but also concepts and meaning formations in the history of psychiatry in modernity. Dr. Diver’s treatment of patients centers on two primary subjects: the trauma of incest and the “condition” of homosexuality. These “economies” are most clearly connected to and by the sentimental. Susann Cokal comments that analysts find incest as a key plot point in patients’ master-­narratives and are prepared to hear of it. Freud’s early Studies on Hysteria (1895) written with Josef Breuer, featured five case histories in which the “pathology “arises out of forbidden father-­daughter conflict” (Cokal 75). Freud uses the incest metaphor as an almost universal but secret fantasy. Fiercely relational models of “like” and “same,” incest and homosexuality deny the most in-

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timate of differences as well as the most strongly professed social taboos of both kinship and reproduction. ­Nicole as Daddy’s girl victim knits the black clerical “collar” genitally worn by the twentieth-­century doctor and husband in the “new world in which he believed.” Dick is transgendered in the gaze; at a closer look, he is also castrated as was Fitzgerald as a showgirl at Princeton and at parties in St. Paul.3 ­Nicole has decorated the phallus, encased and made it disappear, thus further underscoring while containing the male power under which she lives. ­Nicole is predictive of Dick’s feminine role and complex self-­perception as the novel unfolds. The bathing drawers scene is one of the first moments in Tender in which we see an obsessive transference on Fitzgerald’s part among characters and roles, where “all of his characters are Scott Fitzgeralds,” adding to the suggestive power of an author so of­ten both energized and consumed by this paradox.4 Fitzgerald has Dick begin in contradiction to “have the phallus” but quickly becomes the sexual object that can “be” the phallus, “transparent[ly]” neutered. The hapless Ameri­can novelist Albert McKisco then pronounces his judgment on the scene before compounding his gaffe with “I beg your pardon.” However, it’s Dick’s “gaff ” that is the center of absent attention here, his being “tucked” into a castration that is further embroidered as feminine.5 The black lace drawers perhaps represent ­Nicole’s subconscious wish to fashion control over the phallus. Yet as with so much else in her life, it’s a cover-­up. For a moment, Dick is performing in her movie and yet not truly the subject there; rather he is in a sort of erotic aphasia as a doll in a drag chastity belt. The early bathing drawers scene in Tender serves to unite a popu­lar novelist, a starlet, an incest victim, a psychiatrist, and two male lovers in what makes Rosemary, child in and of the movies and attuned to their sensibility, “bubble with delight”: presumably this scene itself is “typical” for Fitzgerald of Hollywood, one that would always “pop up” as a paradigmatic scene of sexual titillation without the money shot. Dick’s array and display changes from Rosemary’s “Look at me”—which is what everyone on the beach does—to “look at him,” at “the curious garment on which [­Nicole] had been working.” ­Nicole has made him something to wear and for the audience to read. Although McKisco calls it a different kind of trick, it is an effect in Fitzgerald’s authorial repertoire of tricks that make gender unstable and risible. The “pansy’s trick” by implication is to simulate something you’re not, to practice concealment within flamboyance or perhaps the reverse. Fitzgerald outs sentiment within a dynamic that gender studies now successfully theorizes.6 Royal Dum­phry and Luis Campion’s roles can be tracked through Tender as keys to Dick’s performance of masculinity as well as to Rosemary’s role as sentiment’s tuning fork. Dum­phry and Campion are members of the nominal “out” group on Dick’s beach and are invited to dinner with the Divers when Dick’s in a mood to “give a really bad party”; he seals his wishes by telling ­Nicole, “I’m going

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to invite the two young men” (27). Dum­phry, “a tow-­headed effeminate young man” (8) projects “his girl’s comeliness less startling in the pleasure world of the evening” (33), while Campion, “a bald man in a monocle . . . his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in” (5) “manag[es] somehow to restrain his most blatant effeminacy, and even visit upon those near him a certain disinterested motherliness” (34). It’s Campion whom Rosemary comes upon very late at night outside the hotel when she cannot sleep after the Diver dinner party:



He was weeping hard and quietly shaking in the same parts as a weeping woman. A scene in a role she had played last year swept over her irresistibly and advancing she touched him on the shoulder. He gave a little yelp before he recognized her. “What is it?” her eyes were level and kind and not slanted into him with hard curiosity. “Can I help you?” “Nobody can help me. I knew it. I have only myself to blame. It’s always the same.” “What is it—do you want to tell me?” He looked at her to see. “No,” he decided. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this—so accidental—just when everything was going well.” His face was repulsive in the quickening light. Not by a flicker of her personality, a movement of the smallest muscle, did she betray her sudden disgust with whatever it was. But Campion’s sensitivity realized it and he changed the subject rather suddenly. (40–41)

Rosemary’s response to Campion is immediate and instructive. As he is coded “distressed,” she instinctively becomes her movie role, attempting to be sympathetic as in Daddy’s Girl. She breaches their physical space to touch him, perhaps in womanly identification and because he is no sexual threat. Campion “yelps,” perhaps as a gay male fearing heterosexual violence. He is immediately relieved that she is not negatively “reading” him with “hard curiosity” as gay but with eyes “level” and “kind.” Her offer of understanding and “help” is predicated on her invincibly sentimental role of the Hollywood girl kid who can solve adult heterosexual emotional problems, what Shirley Temple of­ten proffered from age five onward and what Mary Pickford and others had established in movie roles since 1914.7 With his level response of “He looked at her to see,” Campion catches the adolescent starlet in his gaze and decides “no”; he’s a frankly appraising audience and sees a straight girl of no particular insight. He lets her down easily with a

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melodramatic capsule rendering of his romantic situation with Dum­phry, which he severely edits to keep from offending her. Campion attempts to regulate the script of their interview by segueing into the safe gossip of the absurd golf course duel to come between McKisco and Tommy Barban. Campion lapses again into a comic foil for the duel scene, so “terrible” that he’s kitschy, “gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel,” autoerotically overcome at the bogus maleness of it all, while ­Rosemary “suddenly hysterical with laughter,” kicks at him with her shoe (51). ­Rosemary feels at home in a sort of innocent panic at the “play” of aberrance that underwrites and enhances the associations. She’s the Ameri­can audience as well, for “she was accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself ” (15). Campion’s “problem” would never be in ­Rosemary’s “script,” and she is not accredited like Dr. Diver to listen to such “perversion.” Campion is quicker than she in shifting the dialogue, since as a gay male he knows “disgust” when he sees it in a parallax response. When she calls on her actress’s ­discipline— what she has in place of manners—he on the other hand, also with an agile actor’s response, understands instantly her pulling away and “changes the subject” to Abe North, a large male who must be “around here somewhere” and who labels Campion a “sewing circle member” to his face (41).8 Hovering over these two scenes—Dick’s black lace bathing drawers and the events surrounding the golf course duel—is the boorish fig­ure of Albert McKisco. The character is surely based on Robert McAlmon, the Ameri­can writer (see Chap­ter 7) who was an acquaintance of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway in Paris but vexed them both by casting aspersions on them as homosexual.9 McKisco is very aware of Dum­phry and Campion (21); like Campion, he cries in front of ­Rosemary. He states that he has never finished writing his novel and tells her “you don’t like me but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man” (45). McKisco becomes a Campion to her but as a novelist; the two fig­ures (novelist, gay male) become equated in temporary suspension. Later, coming back from his father’s funeral in America, Dick meets McKisco on shipboard. Fitzgerald relates McKisco’s success: his novels are described as “pastiches of the work of the best people of his time”; he has a gift for “sof­tening” and “debasing”—perhaps coded words for popu­larizing as a queering. McKisco, a writer who “charms” the reader (205), cuts close to the bone for Fitzgerald, who was always conflicted about charm­ing his audience, courting the reader with beauty and romance. ­Rosemary, sentiment’s judging eye in Book One, “balanc[es] between pity and repugnance” to­ward McKisco (45). The “pity” is the shock of recognition toward the abject male author, while the “repugnance” is the anti-­gay animus. Fitzgerald’s distaste is displayed in the analogous sof­tening and debasing of Dick’ s allegiances and

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character. Sentimentality can be vicious for Fitzgerald because its practitioners can be both charming and decadent writers for the market as well as become Dr. Diver, who is so indebted to sentiment on a personal and professional level and who breaks down complex material so it can be “digested” and “briefed” in print (116), itself a reductive writer’s stance. Rosemary herself stars in three other separate scenes (69–70, 72–74, 79) in which she encounters a potential queering while naively exploring the gendered limits of Tender Is the Night. She screens Daddy’s Girl for the Diver circle in Paris and announces that she has “arranged” a screen test for Dick. He flatly declines, saying “pictures are a fine career for a woman” but “I’m an old scientist wrapped up in his private life.” He goes on to critique actors in a “tart discussion,” opining that “the strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged” (70). Rosemary and Dick here replicate the implications of the scene of ­Nicole, Dick, and the black lace bathing drawers. Rosemary, in effect, is telling Dick to try on this garment (the screen test) and become a Hollywood “fetish,” a “male [D]ick.” Dick instinctively counters that actors are neutered (“gateway to emptiness . . . too shameful to be divulged”), recalling Dick’s flesh-­colored flat front in the lace trunks, perhaps the “strongest guard” to “nothing” (the absent phallus). For Rosemary, to take “Dick’s image” to California is to take Dick’s masculine-­feminine aura with her. All references lead back to Hollywood’s artifice, to “pansy’s tricks” to which they are equated, and, for Fitzgerald, to “tricks of the heart” (164) and a party’s tricks (216); all male representation in Tender is contextualized within these “tricks.” Dick and Rosemary attend a reception in Paris in a futurist space in which ­Rosemary had the “feeling of being on a [movie] set” (71) where everything is fluid and evolving, where everything is performance. Once again, as in the scene with Campion, “her training told,” and she turns from one face to another until “she found herself presumably talking to a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy’s face” while a “trio of young women” with heads “groomed like mannequins’ heads” and “rather like cobras’ hoods” (72) discussed two people whom ­Rosemary comes to realize are Dick and ­Nicole. The implied lesbian circle decides “they give a good show” but are too provincial and simple, though they admit Dick “can be one of the most charming human beings you have ever met” (73). “Charm” is established in Tender as Dick’s signature as also in McKisco’s texts (205) and Francisco’s persona (245). Rosemary is then vamped by an eager young “poster of a girl [who] had begun to play up” and insinuates herself into Rosemary’s space as if for a tight movie shot. Rosemary gauges her “veil of brittle humor” and with ­“distaste . . . saw her plain” (73), reading her as “gay” as she had read Campion with “sudden disgust” (41). She quickly scans the room for Dick to come and

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save her and when they leave, he sympathetically asks “Wasn’t it terrible?” “Terrible,” she “echoes obediently,” recalling her double valence of “terrible” about Campion outside the Riviera hotel.10 Rosemary careens from scene to scene on this day, finally having her own limited epiphany that is related to the novel’s gendered thematics. Later, after the Divers have gone back to their hotel, she finds herself deep in the Paris night “riding along on top of thousands of carrots in a market wagon” with the Norths, ­Collis Clay, and “a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection” (79) who dances with a man in drag in the Melarky Manuscript. ­Rosemary surveys the whole city from this phallic perch, wishes Dick were with her in “the warm darkness,” and throws carrots down at Abe. Then, coming home at dawn, “She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-­chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter—like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it and everything all at once seemed gorgeous” (79). Rosemary’s sighting of the tree includes her inscription of herself within the parallax view. The adjective “moving” suggests something emotionally “moving” as well as a prop in a “moving picture,” even as the tree “moves” down the boulevard. She is equating herself with what might be considered Hollywood’s key signifier in relation to her sexual self, “strapped” into a truck “like a lovely person,” which she undeniably knows herself to be. Rosemary identifies with the tree, a lovely girl in the “undignified” business within the gaze; she sees no difference between being performer and audience. If Dick can be neutered in black lace drawers, her “trick” is to identify with a “blooming” phallic object. Dick has told her that she is the only girl he’s seen in a long time that looks like she is “blooming” (22)—is she the flowering tree to be replanted on the very pub­lic Champs Elysees? Rosemary, instead of “being” the phallus as sexual object, intuits a way to “have” it, to replace Dick’s “smooth” front from the “pansy’s trick,” and to be the tree as phallus. It appears that while Dick can be “tucked,” Rosemary can acquire a “strap-­on” and thus the sec­ond blatantly sexualized emblem scene of Book One succeeds in a comic reemergence of phallic presence after its absence on the Riviera beach. ­Rosemary functions quite effectively as a split-­off feminine half of Fitzgerald. She’s a lovely, chaste, girl trooper whose mother tells her she’s a boy, who can pronounce with “distaste” that gays and lesbians are “terrible.” Fitzgerald as Rosemary can perform fantasy management of his own “esoteric [sexual] burlesques,” confirming phallic absence (21) and presence (79). Thus “lovely” and “undignified” can also stand as Fitzgerald’s mixing of modes, his confidence in the beautiful and the vulgar as

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an opposition he could sentimentally orchestrate through Rosemary. She finally rides “laugh[ing] cheerfully” on Hollywood’s wave, manipulated and approving of it; Dr. Diver awaits another fate.

Francisco and the Return of Royal Dum­phry At the beginning of Book Three, Dick is rapidly losing his effectiveness at the clinic due to excessive drinking and increasingly impatient and impetuous outbursts. He travels to Lausanne to consult on a case of alcoholism and homosexuality and encounters a Spanish father who pleads with Dick to take his son ­Francisco’s case. Dick sternly begins to lecture Francisco on the life-­long discipline needed to cope with his “afflictions,” yet: He talked automatically, having abandoned the case ten minutes before. They talked pleasantly through another hour about the boy’s home in Chili and about his ambitions. It was as close as Dick had ever come to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle—he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetrate his outrages, and, for Dick charm always had an independent existence, whether it was the mad gallantry of the wretch who had died in the clinic this morning, or the courageous grace which this lost young man brought to a drab old story. Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away—­ realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for ­Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ­ending—­in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life, he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved—so easy to be loved—so hard to love. (245) Fitzgerald here crafts the most significant single passage in Tender Is the Night with relation to sentimental identities. Dick can speak to Francisco without professional pressure. In deducing Francisco’s “charm,” he can empathically “arrange” it to his ego’s advantage, to match his own outrages, which are becoming more numerous. He can further valorize this charm by linking it perhaps to the “mad gallantry” of the dead eczema woman. Dick can even see Francisco as a fighter

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of “courageous grace” as he girds himself to describe his own imagined heroism. His signature mode is to “dissect it” into small “pieces,” giving himself emotional keepsakes as personal capital in a jouissance through one of sentiment’s autoerotic transferences. The aesthetic object most admired becomes Dick’s own sensitivity. He has taken in all who “press[ed] up close,” converting them into himself in a sentimental tranference,11 while he purports to see lovers and friends only as they are, and wants only their “completeness” for themselves. Dick’s sentimental carrying of the “egos” allows him to produce belief and master his psyche’s production while usurping all the bodies as desiring subject. In Dick’s case, he uses Francisco as muse in an elaborate rationale of what both defines and deforms him.12 Francisco through his charm queerly activates Dick’s intact ego and thus integrity. Here is Dick at what he feels is his best, hoarding these egos and carrying them on the books like obligations. They constitute both the walls of his fort and the means by which he can birth his sympathy. Dick takes on the sentimental male burden, absorbing into himself all the characters and their emotional baggage. Dick’s intimation when young that “he was the incalculable element involved” had caused in him a “philosophical detachment” (139); it is this dynamic by which he transforms Francisco’s inversion into his own sentimental diagnosis. Dick Diver reaches his apotheosis by denying what Francisco is but identifying with the charm he exudes in an abstracted ideal male nurturing without bodies. Fitzgerald’s achievement in this familiar Ameri­can romance paradigm is a sharp veering away from the physical facts of the scene toward such an “abstraction.” Fitzgerald writes in 1929, “About five years ago I became, unfortunately, interested in the insoluble problems of personal charm” (Letter to Betty Markell). Henry Dan Piper cites a “charm obsession in the 1920’s that included charm schools, manuals, magazines, and other vehicles of ‘good taste,’” and concludes that “the first hundred pages or so of Tender is the Night [are] one of the best guides ever written on the theory and practice of charm” (212, 214). Piper quotes a notebook entry appended to The Crack-­Up in which Fitzgerald wrote, “The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them, makes that tensity that is the secret of all charm—when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you just become another victim of self-­indulgence—breaking down the solid things around you and moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable?” (209). “Luxuriance” suggests the jouissance of Dick Diver extrapolating from his “reading” of Francisco: “self-­indulgence” leads to “vulnerability.” Here “charm” as an oxymoron appears in a radically physical form, where “smart men play close to the line” (Tender 99), the “tensile strength of [Dick’s] balance” (65) that Fitzgerald bequeaths to him and then takes away.13 Fitzgerald’s signature process of fictionally converting sentimental relational

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moments into a high mourning that manages loss is never better expressed than in Dick’s reverie with Francisco. In Greg Forter’s “Against Melancholia,” he references Gregg Horowitz on mourning: “The mourner decathects the psychic traces of the lost object not to forget them, but to detach them from the lost object and thus render them memorable for the very first time. In this way, grieving preserves the intimacy with the lost object despite its being lost to us” (Horowitz 153, qtd. in Forter 138–39). When the “personalities” press up too close, Dick in effect detaches the egos to carry them and ethically direct his sentiment. Dick tries to align and extend himself in his interior monologue about charm and “leave out” Francisco himself while “absorbing” his “qualities.” Dick effectively “embalms” or valorizes Francisco—a “lost” boy as Dick calls him—to defend against an unacknowledged homosocial crisis. One reason Dick will not treat Francisco would be that he recognizes himself in the young man and would have to admit lineaments of his own “illness.” It’s also possible that Fitzgerald knew of Freud’s skepticism toward “treatment” of homosexuals and accepted it to some degree.14 Dick in his rendition evidences a sadomasochism through what Hinton calls a failed mirror, a “refracting surface or lens” (16). Here is Dick’s sentimental motion through his intimation of charm with Francisco that he turns back upon himself. Dick, in colonizing Francisco’s persona, performs self-­analy­sis and “reads” himself as an analysand. Francisco as refracting self allows Dick to order his symptoms into a coherent narrative. Jameson articulates this double movement of analy­sis and synthesis: “having disengaged the basic deep structure, the analyst is then able to generate back up out of it not only the origi­nal text but all the other variants of which the model is susceptible as well” (The Prison-­House of Language 127). Dick as analyst has diagnosed the “deep structure” of his sentiment in his “charm” and has generated the text he feels he can stand and live in. Within Dick’s uneasy admiration for Francisco’s emotional makeup is clearly a shock of recognition, sublimating a hint of an actual gay sensibility and what Dick allows as his kinship through charm’s performance. Then Fitzgerald uncannily complicates Dick’s identification with Francisco’s charm and courage when Dick encounters an old party guest:



As he sat on the veranda with young Francisco, a ghost of the past swam into his ken. A tall, singularly swaying male detached himself from the shrubbery and approached Dick and Francisco with feeble resolution. For a moment he formed such an apologetic part of the vibrant landscape that Dick scarcely remarked him—then Dick was on his feet, shaking hands with an abstracted air, thinking, “My God, I’ve stirred up a nest!” and trying to collect the man’s name. “This is Doctor Diver, isn’t it?”

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“Well, well—Mr. Dum­phry, isn’t it?” “Royal Dum­phry. I had the pleasure of having dinner one night in that lovely garden of yours.” “Of course.” Trying to dampen Mr. Dum­phry’s enthusiasm, Dick went into impersonal chronology. “It was in nineteen—twenty-­four—or twenty-­ five—” He had remained standing, but Royal Dum­phry, shy as he had seemed at first, was no laggard with his pick and spade: he spoke to Francisco in a flip, intimate manner, but the latter, ashamed of him, joined Dick in trying to freeze him away. (245–46) Royal Dum­phry arises from the novel’s unconscious, a specter from Dick’s past and one that signifies a shift to Fitzgerald’s familiar parodic use of a queer textuality. When Campion is last seen in Book One, recovering from mourning the end of his affair with Dum­phry, he “lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery” (51) after the excitement of the golf course duel. When “swaying” Dum­phry appears, it is as if he has arisen from bedding Campion in that self-­same shrubbery— five years and two hundred pages later—the two of them fused in the novel’s memory. With “My God, I’ve stirred up a nest,” Dick moves back to perceiving a group of gay males nearing. Rather than identifying with Francisco, “they” have become “them.” Yet Dum­phry “pressing up close” calls up Dum­phry’s own most sentimental memory, the magic night at Dick’s party. Fitzgerald’s abrupt shift of scene succeeds through the fundamental parallax of the sentimental, the way it can shift its force and trigger an equal and active response that draws the fictional subject (and reader) into the scene and then, when a sentimental truth becomes uncomfortably resentimentalized, hastily renounce it through a displacement of the object and a shift of position. Dum­phry cancels Francisco’s hypothetical grace and brings Dick back into the compromised and staged world of his sentimental past.15 Dum­phry becomes retroactive in this extended scene, retriggering the concealed homosocial into Dick’s consciousness. Fitzgerald never allows Dick to contemplate himself without his relation to other people; here he is whipsawed through gay attraction and repulsion. To Dick, Dum­phry’s memory of the Diver party’s sentimental spectacle is the view from the closet. Sentiment always contains a powerful politics of privileging the right sort of sentimentalist over the wrong one. Who “owns” the sentimental spectacle depends on manipulating the heteronormative angle of narration and the resultant sympathies to be allocated by authorial decree through a charm that can both “absorb” and also strategically “leave out.” Royal Dum­phry “outs” Dick’s performative talents but in “never forg[etting] that evening in [Dick’s] garden,” Fitzgerald shades Dum­phry’s language close to

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the memory of a seduction. Indeed, the Diver Manuscript has Dick “wonder­ ing whether the man was in the midst of an orgasm” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 596). Fitzgerald’s initial manuscript intent seems to have been to over­ write Dum­phry’s reappearance into a cohort of young gay men, having an assemblage overwhelm the scene (596). In the published novel, the understatement of Dum­phry mirroring Dick and/or replacing Francisco with his own re-­sentiment of the Diver dinner party is far more effective in gauging Dick’s internal brake on his identification with Francisco. Fitzgerald considerably raises and changes the stakes when he has Dum­phry say:



“Doctor Diver—one thing I want to say before you go. I’ve never forgotten that evening in your garden—how nice you and your wife were. To me it’s one of the finest memories in my life, one of the happiest ones. I’ve always thought of it as the most civilized gathering of people that I have ever known. Dick continued a crab-­like retreat toward the nearest door of the hotel. “I’m glad you remembered it so pleasantly. Now I’ve got to see—” “I understand,” Royal Dum­phry pursued sympathetically. “I hear he’s dying.” “Who’s dying?” “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that—but we have the same physician.” Dick paused, regarding him in astonishment. “Who’re you talking about?” “Why, your wife’s father—perhaps I—” “My what?” “Suppose—you mean I’m the first person—” “You mean my wife’s father is here in Lausanne?” “Why, I thought you knew—I thought that was why you were here.” (246)

Why does Fitzgerald choose Royal Dum­phry of all characters to inform Dick of Devereux Warren’s illness and presence? What is the current among the psychiatrist/husband, a gay male party guest, and the incestuous father-­in-­law? Dum­phry as a “specter” is a traumatizing return; in dream logic, he is the per­ son Dick must meet to block the positive valences of gay charm, but Dum­phry also leads him, like some (evil) Proppian “helper fig­ure” in a folktale, to the dying, uncreative father who is rampantly heterosexual in the symbolic. Dum­phry’s sentimental memories of the Divers are compromised by his “familiarity” with Devereux Warren: they have “the same physician.” In a cross-­transference, their “same physician” is surely Dick Diver himself, successor to Devereux Warren in caring for and seducing the abused Warren daddy’s girl. Dick moves uncannily

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within an economy of incest and homosexuality—husband of a wife raped by her father, psychiatrist to gay patients—that demands extreme manifestations of sympathy that are also bound up with seduction and gender performance. Dick is always already Devereux Warren, and Dum­phry’s disclosure of Warren’s return solidifies that status. Francisco’s father, Senor de Real, resides in the same hotel as Warren and asks Dick to cure Francisco as Devereux Warren asked Dohmler and Franz to cure ­Nicole. The two pleas are similar, as in “My son is a degenerate. Save him!” and “My daughter is a victim of a degenerate. Save her!” When Dick concludes the sentimental analy­sis of his own melancholy—“so easy to be loved— so hard to love”—he can imagine Francisco as possessing “courageous grace,” he has had his moment with him, his own private (orgasmic, masturbatory) dinner party in the garden, so to speak.16 Sentiment for Dick Diver in this crucial scene is the conversion of an intensity into familiarity, a male power appropriation— egos as keepsakes in a compensatory parallactic refraction. Fitzgerald in Tender posits the vision of an underplay[ing] actor who “sets up a craning forward” in his audience. Then Fitzgerald springs his analogy with sentiment and “make[s] us exercise the abstract function of pity” (92). Dick’s epiphany with Francisco is as “abstract” a “function” of his sentiment as there is in the novel, an autoerotic moment, as perhaps are all epiphanies. When converted to novelistic capital, the message becomes, “I don’t want the physical emotional release—I want the moral aesthetic one in which I capture the intensity in an image as a novelist.” Scott Fitzgerald as Dick Diver has had his finest moment with himself.17 The economies of incest and homosocial feeling are so intertwined at this juncture in Tender that we may question how Fitzgerald imaginatively saw them as working together or succeeding each other. Incest and homosexuality may be cast as intimate economies of “same,” manifested in family and gender.18 Most likely, the Lausanne hotel in which “routes cross” was indeed a “stirred-­up nest” to his sensibility and provided a blanket aura of decadence for the rendezvous of Dick with Francisco, Dum­phry, and Devereux Warren. The “vicarious” sentimental identification with Francisco is succeeded by a panicked recognition of the “viciously” sentimental Dum­phry, denoting the spectacle of the Diver party resentimentalized in the hands of the “wrong” sentimentalist. Dum­phry slowly reappears with something like the ghostly intent of Wilson moving up Gatsby’s wide driveway and lawn to deliver the coup de grace. Royal Dum­phry could be said to bring “death” himself to Dick in two forms: the end of same-­sexed “courageous grace” and news of the reemergence of the abusive dying father. Fitzgerald ruthlessly allows Dick Diver to retreat behind Devereux Warren. As with Huck Finn after the final return of Tom Sawyer, Dick sadly is “most glad to find out who [he] was.” Dum­phry becomes a gay male censor, making him flee his positive identification and calling into question his past sentimental wholeness.19

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Fitzgerald readily accepted the androgyny of his imagination but he “didn’t want the man,” he “wanted to absorb his qualities.” In his “tow-­headed” “comeliness” (8, 33), Dum­phry is more the male model of Scott himself in countless pictures than one resembling Dick with his “reddish hair” (12); Fitzgerald appeared to “detach” himself from himself. These uncanny transferences occur within two pages in an enjambed signification. Dick sees Francisco but it’s Dum­phry who looks back, uncannily gazing at Dick in a dream logic through a parallax refraction. Fitzgerald has crafted a grim restoration of the symbolic at the expense of homosocial sympathy and charm. An incestuous father-­in-­law is a safer identification for Dick than a gay male party guest. Charm’s moment is brutally overturned by Fitzgerald, but not before he has taken the intelligibility of Dick’s gender affiliations about as far as he can go while dramatizing laws of kinship and sexual difference through Dick’s sentimental bid to convert his social relations into emotional therapy.

Kaethe and ­Nicole “Touch” Fitzgerald concludes this section of Tender with an encounter between women that breaks into the gay and straight male hegemony of the sentimental transactions in Lausanne. Devereux Warren begs to be allowed to speak to his daughter ­Nicole before he dies. Dick concludes that she must be told of her father’s presence and calls clinic partner Franz Gregorovious to consult but gets his wife, ­Kaethe, on the phone instead. Kaethe goes to find Franz but encounters ­Nicole first: Approaching, she drew her arm gently along ­Nicole’s shoulder, saying: “You are clever with children—you must teach them more about swimming in the summer.” In the play they had grown hot, and ­Nicole’s reflex in drawing away from Kaethe’s arm was automatic to the point of rudeness. Kaethe’s hand fell awkwardly into space, and then she too reacted, verbally, and deplorably. “Did you think I was going to embrace you?” she demanded sharply. “It was only about Dick, I talked on the phone to him and I was sorry.” (249–50) With Kaethe and ­Nicole, Fitzgerald has structurally reprised Tender’s preceding queered scenes. Recall Campion jumping at Rosemary’s touch on his shoulder (41) as well as Rosemary pinned by the insistent lesbian in Paris (73). Dick pulls away physically as well from Dum­phry’s advance. Kaethe is coded “other” as a

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woman of lesser breeding and class than the Divers and resentful of the Divers’ money and power at the clinic. Earlier Kaethe had vented her frustration to Franz that “­Nicole pulls herself back a little, as if she were holding her breath—as if I smell bad” (240). Tender’s objective narrator then redefines her with “a hint of yesterday’s reawakened sweat about [her] person, less a smell then an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay,” that “to ­Nicole born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers dressing her, it was an offence only to be endured” (240). “Toil” and “decay” link Kaethe to the “rude” girls working at Five-­and-­Tens, as part of the “tithe” to ­Nicole (55); the “decay” prefaces the Lausanne hotel, the gay men, the return of Devereux Warren, and a powerful “route crossing” in Tender, that of class and race. Kaethe’s hair has a “thick dark scent” (240); their cottage has an “all-­pervading cauliflower” aroma to Dick when he dines with Kaethe and Franz; it’s as if they live above Myrtle and George Wilson’s garage in Gatsby. Kaethe brings her news to ­Nicole, touches her, and spreads the contagion of incest and homosocial contact. Francisco’s father doubles D ­ evereux War­ren. The eczema woman on her deathbed also doubles Warren. Dum­phry doubles Kaethe who has an eye for Dick as well. “Go to him,” says Kaethe to ­Nicole, cognitively similar to Dum­phry’s imprecation to Dick to visit the father. As Dick finally says bitterly to ­Nicole when she extends sympathy to him, “Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes,” as he tries in ­Nicole’s view to “be saved from [her] contamination” (301), a final emblem of “don’t touch me!” in the Diver marriage as Dick mimes wordlessly, “he was thinking, he was living a world completely his own” (300). Kaethe’s “touch” and ­Nicole’s rebuff lead Kaethe to structurally recreate Dum­ phry’s revelation to Dick about the abusive father.20 Both characters—Dum­phry and Kaethe—diminish the previously “rarefied sentiment[al]” Divers (34). Dark, “pungent,” earnest Kaethe who for so long had “admired Dick” and “stood in awe of him” (242) is matched by Dum­phry with his lovely memories. What ­Kaethe “says” in her scene with ­Nicole is akin to: “You don’t want to be touched by a woman? By the way, your father who raped you is ill in Lausanne.” These uncanny valences proliferate in Tender’s narrative storehouse of images and encounters and create a sentimental performativity that is repetitive: “the heart goes out,” “can I help?” “he looked at her to see,” “condemned” to carry egos, “courageous” grace and charm, “so easy to be loved, so hard to love,” and “the night at your party was wonderful”—and then the yelp from Campion at Rosemary’s touch, from ­Rosemary in Paris cornered by a lesbian, from Dum­phry stalking Dick, and ­Kaethe searching for ­Nicole: did you think I was going to embrace you? Yes. No. A misunderstanding. A lack of communication. It was “terrible,” “distasteful,” “lovely,” “charming.” The actual last line of Kaethe’s question to ­Nicole is her disclaimer, “it was only about Dick,” as it always is for Fitzgerald.

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Thus Kaethe joins Dum­phry and Campion in offending the Divers and ­Rosemary; she is structurally outside the novel’s exchange of white heroines. By the time ­Nicole arrives in Lausanne, her father has walked off his deathbed and returned to America. Now there is “a tight purse to her (vaginal?) lips” (251) as she exudes a “tragic apathy” (252) when she and Dick sit in the Lausanne hotel bar and grill with less to say to each other than Dick and Francisco a day before— a stark contrast to Dick’s energized epiphany about egos.21 When Dick rushes to Warren’s bed, when ­Nicole arrives, their rendezvous at the bed of the incestuous father (in the gay hotel) is where they have always been; they are an enervated heterosexual couple with the dying abusive father between them. In the Diver Manuscripts, Fitzgerald performed a set of overtly hostile references to gay males to wrap this scene in Lausanne. ­Nicole tells Dick, “By the way, Kaethe hates me” and to hustle her out of her mood, Dick continues, “I’ll tell you something funny instead”; when ­Nicole doesn’t respond, he continues, “I am now practically the major of the largest battalion of the Boys I’ve ever seen. This hotel, especially this bar seems to be a sort of clearing house for them” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 608–09). This compulsion to confess kinship with ­Francisco while condemning the “battalion”—to be and not to be Francisco— is then subject to ­Nicole’s own scrutiny as Francisco appears in the bar with the “evening flow” from the dining room. ­Nicole sees the men as “strange” and “threw upon them the odd colored spotlight of derangement” (357). Fitzgerald in parentheses then wrote in longhand: “(Description of fairies here).” Presumably the lines had been positioned in the drafts of Tender for a decade since the Melarky Manuscripts but Fitzgerald ultimately found them too offensive, yet kept them in reserve for when the text might be stressed by homosocial affiliation.22 Fitzgerald in the Lausanne section of Tender Is the Night significantly explored the wellsprings of his gendered temperament in the epiphany on charm and its authorizing of the sentimental.23

Conclusion Each time Fitzgerald creates a heightened sense of gendered fluidity and aberrance in Tender, its frames of uncanny return underscore sentiment’s powerful capture of his sensibility and his homage to and wariness of its premises. The aesthetic object under greatest sentimental scrutiny in Tender Is the Night is Dick Diver’s own absorbing sensitivity. In Tender, the continual muddling of sentiment and seduction is evident in Dick’s inability to feel “whole” unless others do (a maternal, nurturing impulse) as Fitzgerald repeatedly finds that the male sentimental role is seriously inflected by gays, lesbians, and incestuous fathers. After his immediate serial revelations of charm’s gay source (Francisco), charm’s gay memory

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(Dum­phry), and the incestuous patriarch’s deathbed return (Devereux Warren), Dick never again has anything like a sentimental authority or aura in the novel. Male sentiment cast as maternal is denied and ­Nicole can only “continue her dry suckling at his lean chest” (279); Dick now has only “an incalculable story . . . telling itself inside him” (267) as he is “living a world completely his own” (300). As Dick tells ­Nicole, “I’m trying to save myself ” (300). When Fitzgerald was not reflected in someone’s eyes or performing for them, he appears to have felt inert and emasculated. Rosemary is balanced between “pity” and “repugnance” for Albert McKisco (45), and that is where Fitzgerald stands in Tender in his view of the extended sympathy fueled by charm. He also mistrusted sentiment in its roots of charisma that both “sof­tened” and “debased” relationships. In Tender, Dick and other characters are never really touched: Dick’s heart goes out” (183); faces “come up close to him” (155); Dick is the object of the “gaze” (21, 70); Rosemary “bubbles” at Dick’s bathing drawers (21), makes Campion “yelp” at her touch (41), becomes the adorned phallus (79), and escapes lesbian attention (73). ­Nicole recoils from Kaethe Gregorovious’s arm (250) as Dick from Dum­phry’s recognition (245–46). In so many cases, Tender’s characters are Sedgwick’s “targeted embodiments of sentimentality” (Epistemology 222). The burden of feeling shifts back and forth between the heroic “whole new world in which [Dr. Diver] believed” (Tender 101) to what that world “condemned [him] to carry” (245). If Dick Diver has been pushed into his role of “carrying the egos,” it is in part because of his fantasy of saving, nurturing, or replacing the two dead Diver (Fitzgerald) sisters in his mother’s eyes; he feels pathos with himself; the grand abjection of carrying the egos seems akin to pregnancy, of “carrying” other bodies to term. Fitzgerald endows this root maternal definition of sympathy for his sentimental doctor. Dick Diver’s multiple roles for Fitzgerald are always determined by his fierce relational sense of his own being as beyond any core personality. Žižek writes that a question in the discourse of the hysteric is always “Why am I what you are saying I am” (Looking Awry 131), itself a paranoid extension of the sentimental parallax. Through his response, Dick in effect questions Royal Dum­phry as both Francisco’s double and Devereux Warren’s agent: why, he might say, are you outing me, defining my place in the symbolic order, first as gay “charmer,” then as the stand-­in for the abusive father? Fitzgerald crafts Dick as hysterically justifying himself to himself as charmer—that is what “whole-­souled sentiment” would become for him; as Žižek finds Lacan knowing, the “discourse of the analyst” starts “precisely from the element that escapes the discursive network, that ‘falls out,’ that is produced as its ‘excrement’” (131). Thus we may identify Fitzgerald’s obsession with the dead sisters, who have first “fallen out” of the mother and then out of the world and the corollary thought, “I have to bind everyone (the egos) to me

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as if I am the mother, re-­seeding my womb.”24 Lacan coined le sinthome, a floating signifier, “permeated with enjoyment,” of “jouis-­sense”; Žižek concludes that this point functions as the ultimate support of the subject’s consistency, the point of “thou art that” (132), perhaps the “charm” through which Dick Diver feels “I am best so,” in carrying the egos, with all due heroism, and sympathy, completing the unfinished business of “turning back” to the “two women in Paris” (Tender 101), who are the two Diver sisters to be saved and hoarded. Fitzgerald could not finally let stand the imaginary scenario for Dick that he and Francisco are “same” or that they both could exist outside of Devereux Warren. Fitzgerald brilliantly represents the superego policing unacceptable desires born of sentiment.25 Dum­phry and the contagious fig­ures he “carries” with him (Campion, the Paris lesbians, Francisco, Devereux Warren, ­Nicole, and Kaethe) perform what Sedgwick would call a “chiasmic” narrative in which two subjects cross each other in a rhetorical fig­ure that “conceals their discontinuity” (Between Men 15) and which itself may be parallax construction. The incest taboo underwrites heterosexual kinship and powerfully reestablishes Devereux Warren. Fitzgerald’s quandary was that he intuited that’s what best about Dick Diver is outside patriarchal penetration, that it inhered in the more feminine absorption of egos. It’s the only way Fitzgerald could talk about his most personal conception of love in Tender Is the Night. In order to contain a transgressive identity, Fitzgerald conceived Dick as functioning through what appears on the surface as a sentimental male appropriation of the maternal. Then to avoid finally being sentimentally queered and/ or feminized, the textual unconscious demands, “summon the predator-­father!” in the extreme heteronormative definition of the symbolic’s logic. The embodied “rhetorical fig­ure” that crosses these subjects is nominally Royal Dum­phry, but the fig­ure is actually Dick Diver himself and his absorption that wants what the male has but not the male itself (“I cling to my own innards”), that wants the fruits of the homosocial bond and sensibility while enforcing the homosexual prohibition. To be a “female Scott Fitzgerald” is one thing, to be a gay male Scott Fitzgerald is a proscribed other. “All my characters are Scott Fitzgeralds” could be any author’s truism about fictional selves but it is particularly telling in Fitzgerald’s lack of boundaries amongst egos, bodies, genders, and desires in compulsively working through his debts to sentiment.

II Refractions

4 Sentiment and the Construction of ­Nicole Warren Diver

What does Refractions mean as a title for the succeeding Chapters 4 through 6? Refraction is the change in direction of a wave due to a change in its speed. To “refract” is the act of breaking open or breaking up, a rebounding, light or heat being diverted or reflected from its previous course, passing obliquely out of one medium into another of different density. Tender Is the Night with its Tender Is the Night years of drafts under the sign of different fictional imperatives and the emotional tenor of Scott Fitzgerald’s life and marriage, of necessity meant that Tender Is the Night would be “diverted” and “reflected” from successive lines of intent and narration. Sentiment itself is in continual refraction—representing, identifying, and absorbing—in its dynamic. Sentiment can reverse feeling by shifting the extension of sympathy to the suffering object to the refracted emotional well-­being of the spectator, reader, or subject. When Dick Diver “carries” the egos, he fortifies his sense of self as well as makes other people “whole.” He believes he passes from the “density” of Francisco’s charm into his own created heroism, one that proves fraught when Dum­phry “refracts” Dick’s sentimental image back upon him. Interpretation stipulates that sentiment is part of the first impression that a character has, part of “the reflection in the mirror.” What we see as “hearts going out” always already includes ourselves in response. Immediately before Rosemary turns to find a dead Jules Peterson on her bed in Paris, Fitzgerald writes a stunning paragraph that defines his pervasive use of refraction in narration and draws on the myriad and intricate perceptions of rearranged fragments: “In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half-­ noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond

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these a thousand conveyors of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-­frames, the edges of pencils or ash-­trays, of crystal or china ornaments: the totality of this refraction—appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-­fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time” (109). Objects in a material space, to which Fitzgerald is always committed, exemplify this subtle and powerful account of parallax refraction, which happens in a dynamic of particle and wave conveyed by light. The fragments that appear to us as well as those in our subconscious work together to form our sentimental response. Dick’s explanations to himself and to others are always “shaped” by Fitzgerald in rare beauty as well as deep association. The eczema woman and Francisco have charm that Dick analyzes (183–85, 245); they break up in refraction as Dick finally does after carrying the egos from the “broken universe of the war’s ending.” The personalities are met, egos are carried, and the totality of Dick’s life is different in quality than in its discrete segments. Francisco and then Dum­phry come to inhabit a “depthless” space of charm with Dick and the eczema woman. In the Paris restaurant, Dick’s epiphany of rare sentiment equilibrates the “object” planes of the Gold Star Mothers, Dick’s father, and images of the South­ern cavalier, and the two women, ­Nicole and ­Rosemary. The background and object planes in these sites interpenetrate one another in what is close to a Cubist fiction (see Chapter 6). In his disquisition on “refraction,” Fitzgerald may be inviting us into the workshop in which Tender is forged or “faceted.” “The sheer number of pieces” (Tender 109) have to fit the high sentimental moments that Dick’s sensibility “works up.” A lustrous prose is always in evidence in the number of narrative extrapolations in Tender that mark Fitzgerald’s pages, in which he shifts from limited to full omniscience and alternately disperses insight into character zones. Curnutt identifies “elegiac rhapsodizing” as Scott’s forte (126), an apt description of the rhetorical form of key sentimental scenes in the novel (Tender 34, 57–59, 100– 01, 183–85, 245). ­Nicole Warren Diver herself is always the inscrutable center of Tender’s crimes and narrative “irregularities.” What is the totality of her refraction for Fitzgerald? From what fragments and irregularly shaped pieces of Sara Murphy and ­Zelda Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald’s two dead sisters is she refracted? ­Nicole is perhaps the best example in Tender of a totality of refractions in a resentimentalizing of representations, while she herself remains an unsentimental subject. ­Nicole’s construction is a continual refraction that lurches among Fitzgerald biography, psychoanalytic praxis, romantic projection, and an author’s need to finally complete a haunting and haunted text. As Chandler comments, “the sentimental mode [is] dependent on a relay of regards virtualized in a medium,” one that he calls “sight lines” (13–14).1

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After theorizing Tender’s two “versions” in The Parallax View (18–19), Žižek objectively posits two narratives that are in crucial aspects mutually exclusive and that “the only solution to this deadlock, of course, is to conceive of those two narratives as the two complementary ideo­logi­cal gestures of resolving/obfuscating the underlying deadlock” (POF 11). To save ­Nicole and ­Zelda in uncanny writerly fashion was to activate the “saving of the two sisters’” material in a new configuration; Scott had never confronted the two sisters’ text in such an intimate relation in his own work. The ­Nicole plot meant bringing the entire range of Scott’s adult grief and mourning very close to the surface of his work. Rosemary and ­Nicole were both necessary to complete Tender Is the Night and give form to the imagined narrative of the two Fitzgerald sisters and ­Zelda. The “order” that the 1934 published version of Tender honors is that of “two sisters before his birth” and “mad wife in the present” (1930–34). Here combined is the “origi­nal” sentiment surrounding Scott’s birth with the present-­tense agony of ­Zelda’s illness. These two traumas demand two narratives: Rosemary’s to honor him and ­Nicole’s to justify and then pull him apart. Such is the sentimental curve of Fitzgerald’s psychic and then real life as the two traumas curve and refract off each other in the gaps, if you will, in the dialogizing of “two traumas.”

­Nicole: Construction as Refraction ­Nicole Warren Diver initially is a mystery to the reader, part of the balancing act in “the rarer atmosphere of sentiment” that keeps the Divers aloft. ­Nicole moves through much of Tender within a fragile composure. It’s sphinx-­like ­Nicole— modeling roles she tragically is always somewhat removed from as daughter, lover, wife, and mother—who gave Fitzgerald a challenge and the opportunity to most fully implicate sentiment in a ruined but largely opaque character. Yet Fitzgerald never allows ­Nicole to tell her story of seduction and betrayal; she never relates any narrative to a doctor in the text; she does not come close to revealing dreams or early childhood memories. The cobbled-­together site of “­Nicole Warren Diver” is a series of choices and imperatives for Fitzgerald that can bridge the shifts for the reader from the elegance and slow ease of the ­Nicole of Book One—largely modeled on the character of Sara Murphy—to the disturbed girl and haunted young wife of Book Two and the recovering incest victim of Book Three who separates from her husband. Her breakdowns are swift and vivid, set against her ghostly and languid beauty and unresponsiveness. With her mother’s inheritance, ­Nicole owns a clinic but not her incestuous rape by her father. The description of that event is given by Devereux Warren himself in an exclusively male transaction-­ confession with her doctors at the Dohmler clinic; he then offers to pay all bills. Not much of what we know as the contemporary abuse narrative coheres around

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­Nicole’s story. In an era of identity politics, we are conditioned to expect victim accounts as centers of sentimental narration. This refusal on Fitzgerald’s part to allow for ­Nicole’s rendering of her trauma can be scored as a (patriarchal) weakness of the novel’s gendered narration. However, what Fitzgerald inscribes in the novel’s plan holds true: “Only her transference to him [her husband-­psychiatrist] saves her,” which is to say the diversion of her violent emotional abuse in narrative refraction saves her. The novel’s plan concludes that ­Nicole shall have “no experience, no orientation except what he supplies her. Portrait of Z ­ elda—that is, a part of ­Zelda” (Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur 338). ­Nicole’s portrayal is rigged right here; the hasty addition of “­Zelda” at the end of the passage is a Fitzgerald strategy of wish-­fulfillment and a premature containment in the “part” of Z ­ elda he will dole out. Fitzgerald will not allow ­Nicole the strengths of the sentimental heroines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the novels of seduction and domesticity, respectively. Such negation forced him to find other ways of articulating his “two traumas.”2 Pre-­modern sentimental heroines dating back to Samuel Rich­ ardson’s Clarissa (1748) have most of­ten expressed feelings quite freely in word, gesture, and bodily symptom (Herget 7). Clarissa was a massive epistolary novel, a form finally effaced by the nineteenth-­century realism of Austen and Eliot with its roster of famous heroines seeking “matches” who possessed exceedingly well-­ rendered sensibilities. However, ­Nicole “knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent” (Tender 26). The difference between structures of sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is key for F ­ itzgerald, who draws on both. Hinton notes that epistles were submerged into the narrative framework of many nineteenth-­century novels—just so was the spectator submerged and incorporated into the structure of nineteenth-century narrative omniscience (94). Thus what Fitzgerald fashions in modernism is access to the tools of both types of sentimentalism: sympathy which is more aristocratic and less bodily, and “identification,” which is Freudian, visual, and physical in mirroring and becoming the “other” in overdetermination. Fitzgerald (and Dick Diver) may be fallen aristos, “rilling out” sympathy, but Dick is also the colonial body that absorbs. The difference may be between Richardson’s Lovelace peeking through Clarissa’s door and Bronte’s “Nelly, I am Heathcliff !” Fitzgerald borrows from early sentimental fiction the trope of using ­Nicole’s letters to Dick as her initial character definition. She already melodramatically confuses romance, seduction, and her father’s abusive act when she exhorts Dick in a letter, “Come back to me some day, for I will be here always on this green hill. Unless they let me write my father, whom I loved dearly” (122). ­Nicole’s letters are tales from the front of her wounding, as she travels abused Europe in “re-

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covery” in 1918–19. Her armistice is in her “slowly coming back to life” in the terrain in which she “scarcely knew there was a war” (124). The naive and sentimental lovers begin in a highly symbolic structure of war and peace with their bodies and geographical positioning as markers.3 ­Nicole does not negotiate between reason and feeling in her self-­understanding; this is what might be called the associative nature of high sentiment (itself sentimental) bequeathed to canonical nineteenth-­century characters such as Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke or James’s Isabel Archer. Only in her final role as Tommy Barban’s lover is she allowed what is perhaps the twentieth century’s version of redemption, the bourgeois sentimentalizing of sexual fulfillment as health, what has been called a key to modern sentimentalism.4 Seduction is the central motif of sentimental fiction, the “ultimate betrayal of guardianship” (Fluck 19), and ­Nicole circulates in Tender as a patient, victim, lover, patron, and mistress of the clinic, recreating in her passage the trajectory that sentiment allows the reader to experience as guilty pleasures the slippage between seducer and guardian (20). Fitzgerald’s choice of incest as the sexual crime in Tender binds the novel more tightly into a sentimental frame. Incest cannot be spoken in Tender Is the Night beyond Devereux Warren’s confession. No acknowledgment exists in the text that the Norths, Tommy Barban, or Baby Warren know of ­Nicole’s violation; however, the symbolic moment hovers over the entire textual production, rife as it is with a doubling of scenes, characters, and uncanny returns of “same.” ­Nicole is entreated by Dick (unsentimentally) to “control yourself !” (112).5 Fitzgerald has other narrative goals than ­Nicole’s putative sentimentally heroic status for a Europe, which out of its nineteenth-­ century sentimental soul, conceived the darkness of a Freudian explanation of sentiment as an “always already” cover story for sexual warfare and then “blew itself up” in modernity. Since Fitzgerald essentially wanted to deny ­Nicole an artistic consciousness and outlet, it is instructive to look at the several key moments in Tender where ­Nicole herself is reconfig­ured as domestic heroine who practices sewing and decorative arts within the novel’s symbolic as a (Hollywood) seamstress and designer of asylum bars, respectively. After this chronicle, I move to a close reading of Dick’s most celebrated patient, the eczema woman, through whom Z ­ elda undoubtedly makes a vivid cameo appearance on a day in which ­Nicole concludes by demonstrating her own madness at the Agiri Fair. Fitzgerald in Book Three of Tender ultimately allows ­Nicole to become the center of the novel’s consciousness as she scrutinizes Dick’s demise and her own awakening. Finally, ­Nicole has a sexual awakening that questions Fitzgerald’s conclusion as to what it portends for Dick and ­Nicole and for the sexual and narrative politics of her representation. Nothing

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quite illustrates what Hinton calls “the perverse gaze of sympathy” more strongly than Fitzgerald’s full field of relations in the name of parenting, ravishing, loving, and saving ­Nicole Warren Diver.

­Nicole and Decorative Arts: Black Lace Bathing Drawers and Filigreed Bars What does ­Nicole’s praxis as seamstress and decorator signify about her illness? What is the relationship between Fitzgerald’s need to keep ­Nicole from a true artistic consciousness and ­Zelda’s intense pressure to create as a dancer, writer, and painter? Before Dick’s modeling of the black lace drawers on the beach, ­Nicole is unusually verbal and animated. The reader knows “she picked up a piece of sewing” (18) and that she senses Rosemary’s crush on Dick (“oh, she chose him, and ­Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him” [19–20]). ­Nicole then, presumably sewing all the while, begins to critique the beach crowd, relating that the ­McKiscos’ “with the name that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or butter” had a beach quarrel in which she tossed sand in his face “so naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand” (20). ­Nicole as incest victim conjures up an angry man astride his wife on the “bed” her husband has made (the sandy beach). This marriage argument by proxy ends addressed to Rosemary, the real target of ­Nicole’s displeasure: “‘I’m not going to have my nose rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard woman,’ she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her voice, ‘Children, put on your bathing suits!’” (20–21). ­Nicole has successfully reduced both Rosemary and Dick to children and man­ ne­quins caught in her direction. It’s a brief moment of control for her and not without marital sexual ambiguities. This period in the Fitzgeralds’ lives was rife with accusations from both of them about the putative gay leanings and behavior of the other. ­Zelda adored bathing suits, as did Lois Moran, the model for ­Rosemary (Cline 202), and in Tender ­Nicole buys “a dozen bathing suits” plus “three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns” (55), presumably of a pinkish-­white hue suitable for the flesh-­colored lining of Dick’s black lace trunks.6 Fitzgerald hints at a ­Nicole as Penelope, fashioning on the beach a burial shroud for her Odysseus’ sexual organ, which would symbolically keep Dick as a suitor at bay and would unman him. As with so much else in her life, it is literally and figuratively a cover-­up. In the hotel in Paris at the end of Book One, mad ­Nicole had envisioned herself wearing the “spread” with Peterson’s blood from ­Rosemary’s bed: “I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed” (112). ­Nicole has a certain resignation and mannequin-­like pliability, akin to Dick’s robot-­like appearance in the black bathing trunks. The bloody coverlet is what she will wear for him; the bathing trunks

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are what he would wear for her. The two garments together register a parallax involving both partners in rape and castration in a refraction that breaks open the novel’s normative gender and marital roles. Peter Brooks in Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling quotes Roland Barthes speaking of the erotic place where clothing “gaps”; Brooks quotes Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text to the effect that “all unveiling of the truth” (all narrative) is “a staging of the Father absent, hidden, or suspended” (31). This “unveiling” occurs in the staging (gap) between gaze and mirror; a reading of the bathing drawers scene would be an example of what Brooks feels works best through psychoanalytic criticism. The bathing costume ­Nicole makes for Dick is this staging of the father where his genitals are effaced. Fitzgerald allows ­Nicole to fashion a significant transference at this early juncture in Tender Is the Night. A sec­ond more institutional cover-­up underscores how Fitzgerald deploys ­Nicole’s art to further portray her incarceration and treatment. In 1927, Dick has ensconced self and family at the Swiss clinic that ­Nicole’s money has bought after her serious relapses at Tarmes and in Paris. Dick takes his early morning stroll to the administration building on grounds “no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered yet deceitfully integrated village” containing “the Eglantine and the Beeches, houses for those sunk into eternal darkness . . . screened by little copses from the main building, camouflaged strong-­points” (181). Fitzgerald then takes the reader for a closer look at the architectural design provided by ­Nicole:



Exteriorly these houses were as cheerful as the others; ­Nicole had ­designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and bars and immovable furniture. She had worked with so much imagination— the inventive quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself—that no instructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filigree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were stancher than the massive creations of the Edwardians—even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper. Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest usefulness. (182–83)

­Nicole is extremely utilitarian within the basic design that is to conceal the bars within “flowers.” The filigree work, essentially the embroidery at the window, was the strong end of a tether (a familiar image in Tender) containing the patients in a hollow tubular construction, stronger even than “massive” Edwardian and, by extension, Victorian materials. The filigree is essentially like the light and tran-

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sient trickery of a Hollywood set that contains no solid materials, analogous to the “stage” of the clinic itself. Flowers in “iron fingers” suggest female bodies encased by ominous, anonymous hands. The rooms are beautiful lies—much as ­Nicole is herself, a princess designing her own tower of confinement—yet the rooms are functional, useful, and complicitous. She works in a parody of therapeutic institutional craft workshops, a popu­lar feature of sanitariums in the first decades of the twentieth century, practicing a more directed version of beadwork, carpentry, weaving, and brass work (182). It’s noteworthy that no clinic patient gets to practice high art—no dance, writing, or painting—but rather artisan work, or to put it another way, no patient at Dick’s clinic, in­clud­ing ­Nicole, gets to create with anything like the energy and vision that ­Zelda Fitzgerald brought to her pursuits in three disparate artistic disciplines. ­Nicole’s decoration supports the edifice of psychiatry and its materiality and underwrites her own existence as treatment. In both cases, the Divers’ “audience” on the beach and the clinic’s clients and families are provided with feminized representations that hide male power. In the final tally of the extended images of ­Nicole’s “creations,” the flesh-­colored castrating cloth beneath the lace is analogous to the hollow tubular bars, which are actually more powerful than iron, however sterile. In each case, it’s ­Nicole’s extraction of value, of “aura” on the “set,” that writes a materiality for Fitzgerald that is always charged with relentless performance. Here is no sentiment but rather power being suppressed as he makes the truths of paternal incest and hopeless madness look sensual and graceful through ­Nicole’s complicity.

­Nicole and the Eczema Woman: Breakdown and Flight ­Nicole Warren Diver lives a privileged life as wife of the clinic’s prominent psychiatrist. Her suffering is for the most part silent and internalized. She recovers from five different “episodes” in the novel and is well for more than six-­and-­a-­ half years between 1919 and 1927 (Metzger 69–70). Z ­ elda Sayre Fitzgerald was a patient at Prangin’s in Switzerland from June 1930 to Sep­tem­ber 1931 and suffered greatly in body and spirit. Her letters to Scott during this period are quite moving and center on her desire to get well and return to family and work. She was subjected to myriad treatments, of­ten put in restraints, drugged, and given water cures and a host of minerals and compounds. It was at Prangin’s that her schizophrenia was first diagnosed. Her eczema attacks were fierce and spasmodic and combined with what her doctors noted as “lesbianism mild and constant” as well as “uncontrollable masturbation,” for which she was given insulin shock therapy. On No­vem­ber 10, 1930, she was sent to the “hopeless” ward at Prangin’s called Eglantine where she was bound in facial bandages and restrained so that she could not “improperly” touch herself (Cline 285–86).

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In Tender, a nameless Ameri­can woman painter (hereafter called the “Eczema Woman”) who is suffering terribly from full-body eczema is confined to Dick’s care at the Swiss clinic. ­Nicole never comments on this patient, nor does Dick speak to ­Nicole about her; it is as if they exist in parallel narratives. The Eczema Woman’s brief fierce appearance in the novel occurs immediately after Fitzgerald’s description of ­Nicole designing the bars of the hopeless wards. Dick’s “most interesting case was in the main building” (183), as if to signal a different register and its importance. The doctors have “no very satisfactory history of her” and “now she was a living agonizing sore” of “nervous eczema,” “coherent, even brilliant”; “she was particularly [Dick’s] patient” (183). She enters into a dialogue with Dick under dramatic circumstances, her “rich, deep, thrilling voice” sounding up from within her bandages. She asks why she is being punished with the affliction; when Dick replies that it’s related to the “blush,” she counters, “I have found nothing to blush for since I cut my wisdom teeth.” Fitzgerald manages what turns into a confessional, as she then adds self-­analy­sis: “I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle,” to which Dick replies “You’re neither wrecked nor ruined. . . . Are you quite sure you’ve been in a real battle?” The woman then cries furiously, “Look at me!” (184). This moment recalls both Dick caught in the gaze when wearing the black lace drawers, when he is the performance, or the denial of the gaze by ­Nicole in her breakdown in Paris, when in effect she cries, “Don’t look at me; don’t invade my body’s privacy yet again!” With his agonized patient, Scott himself has reached the co-­doctoring status he always desired in ­Zelda’s case (see Chapter 5). He writes himself into a position of authority through Dick who piously lectures “You’ve suffered, but many women suffered before they mistook themselves for men” but then “retreat” from the argument as from a battleground (184). She states, “I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you knew what it was” (185), a line that moves Tender to a highly self-­reflexive moment: the Z ­ elda-­manqué bitterly beseeches her analyst-­novelist-­husband to save her, to tell her her truth, and to write it into being in the text. Dick can only “mechanically” call it a “greater sickness” and preach about her fixating on quotidian problems. He privately thinks that “the frontiers that artists must explore are not for her, ever,” thus firmly closing another door for both ­Nicole (who will only sew and decorate and garden) and by extension ­Zelda, whom Scott wished to keep from literary endeavors that would threaten his own subject and text. Dick concludes that she was “fine-­spun” and might find rest “in some quiet mysticism,” which is prophetic of the intense religious feeling and relative peace that ­Zelda experienced after Scott’s death in 1940. Finally, Dick’s sentiment obscures what remains of his professional distance, and he “went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so of­ten had ­Nicole”; as her tears flow “lava-­like into her ban-

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dages,” he concludes with an ominous fatherly kiss on the forehead and a tepid, very Ameri­can benediction: “we must all try to be good” (185). The affective refractions here are diverted among lover, father, doctor, and minister and reflect the instability of this brief characterization. Fitzgerald appears to have Dick Diver as stymied as to what to do for his suffering patient, as Scott was himself for Z ­ elda. The eczema itself is a thick crust of body “paint,” connoting that this woman artist is suffering within the integuments of her art, perhaps for practicing it.7 Her body has painted her, turning the idea of muse-­models inside out. She is an affective monstrosity of misdirected desire (toward sex or toward art?), where her “subterranean melodies” (184) may yield, “Look at me! Can you tell me who I am? I believe I may be ­Zelda Fitzgerald.” The Eczema Woman’s body succumbs to what Franz suspects is an undiagnosed neuro-­syphilis (242). Her death sends Dick on his errand and finally to Devereux Warren, another ruin dying in a darkened room. The sensational or beautiful for Fitzgerald then covers what he construed as a nihilism of castration, bars to control madness, and a misdirected heroic woman who challenges men: a bitter, dying woman painter who is treated with an almost unctuous sentimentalism by Dr. Diver.

­Nicole Goes to the Agiri Fair The Eczema Woman’s agony is Tender’s only sustained glimpse into Z ­ elda Fitzgerald’s intelligence as well as her physical and emotional pain. The Eczema Woman interview (183–85) is bracketed on the one hand by ­Nicole’s decoration of the bars (182–83) and her most significant breakdown (188–93), which occurs as the culmination of the same day’s dramatic events. Dick is hounded by an accusation sent in a letter to ­Nicole from a recently discharged woman patient that Dick had seduced her daughter during the mother’s clinical treatment. ­Nicole senses a truth behind the mother’s charge and becomes increasingly distressed as the family sets out along Lake Zurich in the car to go to the Agiri Fair. Dick sees ­Nicole descending into a grave upset, “some story spinning itself out inside her” as her smile becomes “derisive and remote.” She “manages to fix her attention upon . . . a Punch-­and-­Judy show, and to orient herself by anchoring to it” (188). This attempt seems dismal from the outset, since the stereotypical version of Punch is that of a comic-­grotesque wife-­beating husband. ­Nicole’s fixation on the puppets comments on the hopeless aspect of adjusting herself to the role of wife to her psychiatrist-father-­g uardian. The family walks along among the wagons and displays to the “sound of a whining, tinkling hootchy-­kootchy show” (188); thus Fitzgerald frames the run-­up to another mad scene as family abuse done to a low popu­lar beat. ­Nicole begins to run wildly with Dick in pursuit across the fair grounds. He

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frantically circles a merry-­go-­round “till he realized he was . . . staring always at the same horse,” then spies ­Nicole in “what was momentarily the top boat of the [ferris] wheel”; as it descends he “ saw that she was laughing hilariously . . . a crowd . . . spotted the intensity of ­Nicole’s hysteria.” Fitzgerald writes:



“Regardez-­moi-­ca!” “Regarde donc cette Anglaise!” (189)

The crowd “looks at that Englishwoman” while ­Nicole screams “look at me like this!” compelling the pub­lic gaze precisely as the Eczema Woman had asked Dick to regard her that morning (184). The equilibration in madness between the two women stamps them as private and pub­lic representations of two sisters whom Dick cannot save. The vertigo engendered by the merry-­go-­round and the circular ferris wheel is a mad non-­utility with no material function. As Dick labors to make ­Nicole focus in all his familiar persuasive rhetoric, she carnivalizes him further by sharply asking, “Who do you think you are? Svengali?” (190), referencing the evil hypnotist from George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Dick had once hypnotized the Eczema Woman; Z ­ elda’s doctors had tried to hypnotize her as well. Trilby adds to the panoply of characters (cardboard dolls, the painted doll, daddy’s girl, and Judy) to which ­Nicole can be analogized, passed before “the “harlot’s mind” of popu­lar culture which underwrites the scene. Fitzgerald had previously suggested the popu­lar and high culture range of ­Nicole’s emotional affect during her courtship with Dick when he wrote, “She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips” (149).8 Fitzgerald rings the changes in ­Nicole’s affect, from kittenish seduction to something like the “dignity” of the Gold Star Mothers to the Eczema Woman’s agony: “as he [Dick] arose the tears fled lava-­like into her bandages” (185). He describes ­Nicole as intensely performative, the dignity of the suffering perhaps becomes the writing (flowing into fingertips) itself—a fine emblem for Fitzgerald tacking between low and high sentiment in his narrative. “­Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of her skin, saw the withdrawal in his face” and cries “Help me, help me, Dick!”(190). ­Nicole has been penetrated to a preconscious affect of suffering; the corium is the deep inner layer beneath the epidermis, containing connective tissues and blood vessels and certainly suggesting once again her father’s violation. ­Nicole is riven beneath the painted “surface” of her Eczema Woman “sister,” the sensational manifestation of the sexual blush. This nakedness is ­Nicole’s most terrifying moment with Dick and prompts his lengthy exposition, one that seals off her pain and returns the novel to his own: “A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not

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be erected, only suspended, suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and ­Nicole had become one and equal, not apposite and complementary; she was Dick, too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them. His intuition rilled out of him as tenderness and compassion—he could only take the characteristically modern course, to ­interpose—he would get a nurse to take her over tonight” (190–91). “It was awful”: Fitzgerald here vividly interposes the affect of suspension to block sympathy for ­Nicole in her despair (“help me, Dick!”).9 Dick expresses revulsion at sympathy’s extended logic in the dissolution of the sympathetic in­di­vidual into the suffering victim. This state of “one and equal” is the terror of “like and same” that comprises one riddle of all sentiment: to identify with another is to become the other, to lose ego boundaries and to be implicated in the pain as a participant, perhaps both seminal and umbilical. In Fitzgerald’s conception, Dick and ­Nicole becoming equal become a horror, undifferentiated by gender or body. Sentimental distancing is no longer possible, as Fitzgerald clearly challenges the positivism of Dick’s epiphany (245). There’s no way to “absorb” and keep separate here, no way to remain intact. The issues of integrity for Fitzgerald begin with the “integuments” of the beleaguered body and move to the absorbing ego, thence to the efficacy of societal roles and artistic vocation. Invasive sympathy is the shared sexual body in romantic tragedy, in couples such as Poe’s Roderick and Madeline Usher and Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy. In Tender, it’s the stuff of actual incest, the intimate “relation to,” which ­Nicole has already experienced. Dick is wary enough at this point to withhold, to have his insight “rill” out of him as tenderness and compassion (191), a diminished (seminal?) rivulet that ends in his calling for a nurse, the “modern” therapeutic solution. Fitzgerald nowhere crafts such a precise narrowing of the sentimental current, one controlled by the mind and not the heart or body. The more impersonal course that blocks identification also posits sentiment’s demise. The intricacy of suspension and balance also recalls the funicular suspension high above the Alps where Dick had been fascinated by the “ingenuity of the whole idea” (147). In romance, in their mutual desire, ­Nicole “turned coquette and walked away, leaving him as suspended as in the funicular of the afternoon” (155).10 The funicular finally merges with the ferris wheel and the merry-­go-­ round in the techne of the text. Finally, ­Nicole climaxes the terrible day of the Divers by attempting to grab the steering wheel of the Renault away from Dick (192). By my count, there are eight separate chaotic motions of the car in this short, frantic scene where nothing is in balance, suspended, or controlled. ­Nicole’s “mad hand” provides the wildest ride at the Agiri Fair. ­Nicole as a broken patient exhibits a death wish as she roars at Dick, “You were scared, weren’t you?

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2. Scott dubbed this 1920 photo “Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers. Manuscript Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library. Fitzgerald Literary Trust. Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

You wanted to live!” (192). Observing Topsy and Lanier, “the strained faces of the children, looking from parent to parent, made him [Dick] want to grind her grinning mask into jelly” (192). With Dick’s final desperate and violent response, Fitzgerald has at last brought ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman into an alignment for him, ­Nicole’s “mask” related to her “agonizing sore” (183). However, Dick will not sentimentally “gather [­Nicole] up in his arms” as he wished to do with his clinic patient. Dick’s crushing of the “mad hand” on the wheel is a stark battle for narrative control of their lives and extends to Scott’s attempt to retain the narrative of his and Z ­ elda’s married life for his authorial sensibility. Dick and ­Nicole’s married life together is never the same after the scenes at the Fair, which punctuate a day in the life of the Divers in three acts: the description of ­Nicole’s “filigreed” bars, Dick’s interview with the Eczema Woman, and the carnival rides to the death of sentiment’s controlled sympathy. Now Dick cannot “watch her disintegrations” without “participating” in them (190–91).

­Nicole Watches the Performance of Sentiment After their spiritless reunion in Lausanne in Book Three (251–52), the Divers leave the clinic and Dick’s position there, becoming constant travelers in Europe. Increasingly, ­Nicole becomes an observer of Dick’s decline in which his sentimen-

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tal caregiving and performance break down. She says to him sadly, “It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little something I could do for you, Dick” (273). The contingent and grudging (“would” and “could”), rational (“think of ”) rather than emotional, and limited (“a little something”) quality of ­Nicole’s response is far removed from sentiment’s economy. ­Nicole isn’t good at it; she’s not a nurturing presence and no longer deferential. She then reclaims a lost feminine power in which she feels the satisfaction of having Dick and Tommy Barban tilt over her. As with its characters and themes, Tender’s changing narrative consciousness repeatedly absorbs and is absorbed. Fitzgerald was striving toward a hybrid mixture of authorial voice and character point-­of-­view in Tender, which comprises his most experimental foray in his novels. The published novel’s recording sensibility, while not exactly a torch passed from Rosemary to Dick to ­Nicole, does have its points of exchange, much as in the suspension sys­tem for the funicular.11 The responses of these characters are always interlaced with Fitzgerald’s omniscience and commentary. What wounded Fitzgerald was the knowledge that the sentimental resources he possessed, his extraordinary investment in relational valences, were not enough for his characters and for the conduct of his life with ­Zelda. Dick Diver had professionalized sentiment as a vocation for an Ameri­can male; now he begins to crack and strain.12 What remains of sentiment for Dick Diver near the conclusion of Tender is the ability to deconstruct it into the account of an actor’s manipulation. Upon ­Rosemary’s return into the Divers’ lives in 1929 after a four-­year absence, she asks Dick and ­Nicole what they think of her latest pictures. Dick replies:



“It’ll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let’s suppose that ­Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do you do in life? What does anyone do? They act—face, voice, words—the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy.” “Yes—I understand.” “But in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best comediennes have built up their reputation by burlesquing the correct emotional responses— fear and love and sympathy.” “I see.” Yet she did not quite see. Losing the thread of it, ­Nicole’s impatience increased as Dick continued: “The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let’s suppose that some­ body told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to entertain—the audience can do the ‘responding’ for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she must do something unexpected. If the audi-

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ence thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all out of character—you understand?” “I don’t quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out of character?” “You do the unexpected thing until you’ve maneuvered the audience back from the objective fact to yourself. Then you slide into character again.” (288) This short lecture to actress ­Rosemary and a silent ­Nicole contains all the characteristic moves of sentiment-­in-­performance that Dick has been practicing in his professional and personal life for a decade. He begins by invoking an illness for Lanier to differentiate between genuine pain for loved ones and the “burlesque” of “comediennes” performing “fear and love and sympathy.” He loses Rosemary who is only half-­conscious of his affective changes. Dick’s flaw may be that he rather hollowly believes “affect” is all that actors do: “They act—face, voice, words— the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy” (288). Fitzgerald boldly throws back the curtain on sentiment and melodrama. Dick no longer has any primary knowledge of autonomic affect—his heart no longer “goes out,” but he does know about theatrics and performance. The “real life” emotional reaction is only a prop for his lecture. Dick has collapsed the difference between life and art, and Rosemary cannot absorb the baring of the sentimental device. ­Nicole on the other hand feels Dick is tiresome and insincere. The reader feels her dismay, that he’s recklessly unpacking the bag of sentimental “tricks” that has defined his control of their marriage for years. He tastelessly recalls the scene of the dead Jules Peterson when he dismisses a nameless “example” as some “murdered Chinese”—this can only evoke the actual bloody coverlets and incest to ­Nicole. ­Nicole becomes furious at Dick and Rosemary here, realizing “herself ” indeed in Dick’s barely displaced example from Paris where he had most certainly “gone all out of character” and gone “hard” on ­Nicole. What Dick had actually done in the hotel is “maneuver” the murder scene back to himself as a respectable and innocent doctor. Ever since Rousseau’s landmark essay on theatre on the “Letter to D’Alembert” (1758), sentiment has been vulnerable to depiction as an intimate performance, which unites our desire and identification in a complex mechanism. Freud contributes deep structural analy­sis of the sympathy experienced in watching spectacles that could be interpreted as a reaction formation against secret sadistic pleasure and a masochistic identification with the role of the victim. Rousseau’s imagined scene (adapted from Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees [1714]) has great relevance as a theatrical sentimental paradigm that can be applied to many situational narratives: “the tragic image of an imprisoned man who sees, through his window, a wild beast tearing a child from its mother’s arms, breaking its frail

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limbs with murderous teeth, and clawing its quivering entrails. What horrible agitation seizes him as he watches the scene that does not concern him personally! What anguish he suffers from being powerless to help the fainting mother and dying child” (Fisher, Hard Facts 105). In the performance of sentiment, the two continual victims in the paradigm are the child and mother, which if applied to Tender, would enable the reader to cast Dick Diver and his mother grieving over the loss of the two baby sisters with Fitzgerald/Dick as a child victim as well. As Fisher writes in the context of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “In the scene, where once there was a family, there remains only an in­di­vidual who has lost everything” (Fisher 106). As Dick thinks at the Agiri Fair, “Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident” (190). Dick commands the sentimental languages as well as becoming the male spectator who looks at ­Nicole. As sadomasochistic readers and viewers, we enjoy the experience of violence against and the saving of ­Nicole indirectly, perversely, and symbolically. “We” know this as fallen sentimentalists in the modern and postmodern eras. Tender Is the Night chronicles a landmark twentieth-century shift in sentiment from the extension of our sympathy to the courting and needs of our own narcissistic wounds, what in our vicarious reception we absorb in our own complex pleasure. Such a confession by Dick—the master of sentiment’s control— to ­Nicole and ­Rosemary, also places other sympathetic scenes under scrutiny in the novel, such as, for example, Dick’s tour (de force) lecture at the World War I battlefield. After Abe’s “shelling” him with “hundred years of Ohio love,” Dick goes “soft” on his audience where he had been “hard”: “I couldn’t kid here. The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it” (58). Dick is most satisfied in the rhetoric of balance and exchange, as in the scenes involving the funicular and the physical laws of suspension. He believes that “hard” and “soft” can be substituted and balanced through “maneuvers” that “slide” characterization back and forth. Here once again is Fitzgerald claiming to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still function in sentimental performance. The audience does the sentimental identification for themselves after “the actress” gets the audience back to herself in the romantic “center.” The fundamental “trick” is to be soft or hard in contradistinction to the audience’s response, to be one sentimental step ahead of the sentimental audience. Fitzgerald then continues: “­Nicole could stand no more. She stood up sharply, making no attempt to conceal her impatience” (288). The novel’s characters here stand in a doubled relation to Dick’s acting theory; the fictional ­Nicole critiques from her “real-­life” role as patient-­wife. ­Nicole walks away from Dick after he empties his emotional pockets for Rosemary once again. In her distaste, ­Nicole

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cancels the psychiatrist-­director and his actress-­protégé, and the scene ends with her only dependent on her sense of herself. Fitzgerald sentimentally bequeaths to her both autonomy and a romantic selfhood: “Why, I’m almost complete . . . I’m practically standing alone, without him” and “her ego began blooming like a great rich rose” (289). ­Nicole most assuredly has the audience (the reader) back to herself; she has begun to slide into her “own character” at last, one that is defined by romance and not by sentiment. “Dicole,” so joined in this book by the power of sympathy, has been finally pulled apart when sentiment is anatomized; the conundrum for Fitzgerald is that “no one nature can extend entirely inside another” (280).13 Dick finally understands how easy the audience is. He has a selfish and lonely sense of possession, his heart no longer “going out” to anyone.

­Nicole Takes a Lover How should we approach ­Nicole Warren Diver when she is no longer the novel’s sentimental victim? Fitzgerald’s plot solution is evidenced in the qualified sexual free­dom she is granted in romance. She is abruptly (and sentimentally) restored by the end of Tender to something like the young woman she might have been expected to become had she never been raped by her father nor cared for in marriage by Dick Diver. ­Nicole’s final portrayal by Fitzgerald contains a personal imperative. For Fitzgerald to believe in ­Nicole’s survival beyond Tender without Dick Diver in her life was to implicitly believe in another outcome for ­Zelda Fitzgerald that did not include himself. Fitzgerald had to imaginatively confront the fact that Dick Diver might be what keeps ­Nicole from “becoming well,” that for her to survive, she had to end her transference. Fitzgerald then posits Tommy Barban as protector and sexual savior. In Tender’s last twenty-­five pages, ­Nicole hurriedly comes into a sexual flowering and satisfaction that suggests her destiny will be in what has been described as the twentieth century’s sentimental quest, the narrative of our sexual lives as our emotional truth, in everything Foucault has taught us about that obsession as a preeminent discursive regime beginning in modernity).14 Fitzgerald provisionally partakes of this modern sentimentality as well. Nicole “had lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl—now she felt like making up for them” with Tommy Barban (291). Fitzgerald casts her as a saved sister with coming-­of-­age experiences that somehow efface the rape. When ­Nicole becomes “the girl,” she can be assimilated into the novel’s symbolic. Fitzgerald can also uncomplicate her and make her a marker in a comedy of sexual manners as Tommy, a darker and experienced European, gets to do a comparative analy­sis of Ameri­can and European sexual mores. In basically chaste but highly emotional moments with Rosemary and ­Nicole, Dick is never potent in desiring, whereas Tommy comes back from America in the mid-­1920s with a vision

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of Ameri­can girls “who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves, too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips, all brought out in a patch—but nothing further” (295). Shifting from Dick to racialized, militarized Tommy, Fitzgerald alters the refusal of the 1914 “maidens” to the self-­abuse of 1920s flappers, essentially commenting that nothing has changed. The women still withhold themselves but now it is in a masturbatory blush without penetration, using the male mouth for their pleasure. ­Nicole is finally a complex marker and compound of Fitzgerald’s dilemmas of representing the feminine parts of himself in the two sisters and ­Zelda. If Dick had been a stand-­in for Devereux Warren, Tommy is the more acceptable surrogate for her Grandfather Warren, whose “crook’s eyes” are repeatedly invoked in ­Nicole (292, 294–95) near the end of the novel (Metzger 102). With Tommy, the upturn in ­Nicole’s libidinous life is stunning; nowhere in Fitzgerald’s fiction is there such a crescendo of passion. They make love three times in their first day together (294, 296–298): twice in a small hotel, once after dinner and swimming at Monte Carlo in “a roofless cavern of white moonlight” (297), prefacing the powerful image of Tommy and ­Nicole “out upon the Mongolian plain” that punctuates the non-­West­ern and movieland scene. As ­Nicole is changing from Dick’s patient-­wife into Tommy Barban’s lover, she is described as “designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings,” as if giant dollar bills had been affixed in a classic surreal collage. ­Nicole feels the “wrench” of her change, the “dark manner of its coming” (280), which hints at something like her “rape” by Tommy (replacing her father and Dick) welded to the industrial transformation of a design model—both blood knowledge and techne. Tommy “inspects” ­Nicole on a hotel bed as “the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head” (295). ­Nicole has become a design artifact, lover and racing chassis, violated and stripped, yet coming into her own, emergent in Fitzgerald’s deft surreal substitutions.15 Fitzgerald concludes that “the day had progressed at a staccato rate, and in spite of its satisfactions she [­Nicole] was not habituated to such strain” (298). Indeed not. Tommy and ­Nicole’s hotel room is invaded by two Ameri­can girls who are following the Ameri­can fleet and wave “pink step-­ins” at the departing ships from the balcony window. The panties become a “sizable flag,” emblematic of the novel’s intimate scenes of sexual violation and death, where black lace bathing drawers and bloody coverlets have already interwoven sexual violence and murder. The ghosts of the dead Peterson and ­Nicole’s resultant mad scene are uncannily recalled: a hotel room, a frantic knock on the door, and the “step-­in’s” as evidence of a sexual (bloody) conquest. Fitzgerald has repeatedly provided the low popu­ lar coarsening of his own enchanted landscapes, his own “cardboard paper dolls” for “the harlot’s mind”—this time with real young “harlots” in the hotel room.

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Dick Diver having been emptied out, how is ­Nicole represented in a familiar regulation of the sexual symbolic? To be under Tommy’s control is to move from the rapist father and the psychiatrist husband to the racialized warrior, a succession of sensational males who take “the girl” in varied sentimental and melodra­matic roles. Although there is no clear evidence, Fitzgerald may have been structuring ­Nicole’s awakening with Tommy as something akin to a Connie Chat­ter­ley’s disengaging from Clifford and learning of her womanly sexual nature from Mellors, the gamekeeper, in Lawrence’s then-­scandalous novel of 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When Dick gives his sentimental his­tori­cal analy­sis at the World War I battlefield and says “there was a century of middle-­class love spent here. This was the last love battle,” Abe North counters with “you want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence’’ (57). Fitzgerald in the Diver Manuscripts had added “the lay heard round the world” to Abe’s comment, disparaging Dick more frankly (First Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 189). Fitzgerald as Dr. Diver is most moving emotionally when he can capture an era’s his­tori­cal sweep within enormous structures of feeling that sentimentally tidies up the vision of a Lawrence, which included hatred of the war and a pent-­up sexual hypocrisy.16 Tommy Barban has none of Mellors’ intimacy and rough tenderness but like Lawrence’s Mellors, Tommy is the dominant male who would answer all the female’s contradictions. Lawrence’s view of unremitting conflict between the sexes was surely not Fitzgerald’s more openly accepted androgynous imagination. However, the difference is surely in degree, not in kind: Fitzgerald and Lawrence were two slender, romantic, imperious, and sexually fluid authors who lived on their nerves, and their heroines were markers in these representations. ­Nicole Warren Diver’s “restored” life is a profound passage deep into Fitzgerald’s intimation of himself as a beleaguered writer with a decade-­long project and a lonely husband with an ill wife whom he would (sentimentally) pronounce well in his fiction.

Conclusion Tender Is the Night becomes ­Nicole’s book late as she revels in a modern sexual sentimentality, but the novel is never truly hers. It’s still Dick’s story as he becomes fainter and fainter. ­Nicole circulates in sentiment’s currents, its consolations or scripted recoveries; she is sentiment’s object, only to hastily become its subject with Tommy Barban; she never dispenses sentiment from a subject position or moves from it as a strength.17 As she finally breaks with Dick, ­Nicole “began to slight that love, so that it seemed to have been tinged with sentimental habit from the first” (300). ­Nicole is “well,” however ominously, for Tommy is another invasive stand-­in for Devereux Warrren and a final narrative and sexually sentimen-

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tal “solution” for Fitzgerald in the matter of ­Zelda’s illness. It was an act of emotional courage as well as self-­pity for Fitzgerald to cut ­Nicole loose from Dick and, once she was whole, to posit her life with a Tommy Barban whose maleness he feared he had not possessed with Z ­ elda. The death of the Eczema Woman and the setting “free” of ­Nicole with Tommy Barban are very different stories for Fitzgerald. One narrative lectures a fictional ­Zelda who is punished by her own body and then lays her to rest. The other narrative emancipates ­Nicole into a position where she no longer needs her husband and doctor. Both stories “dominate” the women in different ways. Nancy Milford’s biography ­Zelda (1970) claims that Fitzgerald strip-mined ­Zelda’s sanitarium letters to create the letters of teenage ­Nicole Warren and that he is only interested in Dick’s dramatic demise, but to render this familiar judgment is to overlook how Fitzgerald provided for the romanticized recovery of ­Nicole, who is Dick’s great love. If it takes the sacrifice of Dr. Diver, so be it. How sad, how sentimental it is for Fitzgerald to consider in self-­pity that he might be the problem and to conclude that Dick Diver was not good for people and perhaps himself. When Hemingway wrote Fitzgerald on May 28, 1934, to critique the aesthetic of Tender Is the Night’s characterizations, he hammered him for writing “damned marvelously faked case histories” (Baker, Hemingway: Selected Letters 407). He called Fitzgerald out for splicing his rendition of Gerald and Sara Murphy into the personalities of Scott and ­Zelda to make Dick and ­Nicole, explaining that “you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another.” Hemingway questioned the narrative integrity of Tender’s portrayals. Hemingway’s criticism, one that could engage writer’s workshops pro and con till the end of time, points to Tender’s many impulses to both cover tracks and align facts with fictions.18 The “faked case histories” of Hemingway’s reading became the only way Scott could see Tender through to conclusion. It’s not that Scott made ­Nicole do what Sara Murphy or ­Zelda would or wouldn’t do; it’s that he doesn’t give ­Nicole much of anything to do and that ­Zelda wanted to do so much in her arts (see Chapters 5–6). What Hemingway objected to transposes what Scott said he did do when he “admired”: taking the qualities he wanted from the Murphys, absorbing them, and then leaving the Murphys out by creating a psychiatrist and his patient-­wife. When Scott wrote that the Divers’ “emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she [Rosemary] could not have guessed at” (21), he was not merely inserting an awkward foreshadowing but rather was cogent about the entire experience of Tender in his and ­Zelda’s life, the fictions it produced, and the cost. When Scott finally came to an instrumentalized sentimental vision of what “­Nicole Warren Diver” could mean in the imaginative yoking of his subconscious “two sisters” fantasy

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and his choosing among parts of ­Zelda’s life and tragedy, he found the ways that “­Nicole” could control both ­Zelda’s terrible story and ­Zelda’s threatening need to create story.19 This intimation may account in part for how, in the extremity of ­Zelda’s illness and his own perilous writer’s state, that Scott could fashion the sentimental shaping of a fictional wife he could control and save. It is Scott’s and ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s battle for narrative control of their lives to which we now turn.

5 Ophelia, ­Zelda, and the Women of Tender Is the Night Must avoid Faulkner attitude and not end with a novelized Kraft-­Ebing. Better Ophelia and her flowers. —Fitzgerald, General Plan for Tender Is the Night

Ophelia, ­Nicole, and Rosemary As was always the case with allusive material that piqued his imagination, Fitzgerald chose selectively from the roles and language displayed by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He deployed his borrowings in Tender Is the Night in an array of scenes and affects that suited his purposes in characterizing Rosemary, ­Nicole, and the Eczema Woman. In his “General Plan” for the novel dated August 1932, Fitzgerald wrote detailed notes about creating “­Nicole’s” character. He wanted to cull material from disparate psychiatric cases and learn what he could about the background of psychiatric illnesses and treatments; he almost incidentally adds that he will take material from Z ­ elda’s case. He concluded, “Must avoid Faulkner attitude and not end with a novelized Krafft-­Ebing. Better Ophelia and her flowers.” ­Zelda had read Faulkner’s Sanctuary in the fall of 1931 and had given it to a friend to “wake her up” (Cline 294). By Sep­tem­ber 1932, Scott could write to Cary Ross that he had been reading the novel and presumably Z ­ elda had talked to him about it and perhaps had urged him to read it. Fitzgerald wished to avoid Faulkner’s attitude, not the subject of a girl’s sexual defiling and madness. By negatively citing Krafft-­Ebing, Fitzgerald most likely read Sanctuary as a text of sexual violation relentlessly centering on Temple Drake as a fetish, the focal point for Popeye’s impotent voyeurism and abuse (see Chapter 9).1 Thus Fitzgerald writes “Better Shakespeare than Faulkner”; in other words, better to be influenced by the most famous centuries-­tested female erotomaniac in English literature—­ everyone’s hysteric and lost girl from the Renaissance through the Romantics to

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the Victorians—who could refract light back upon Fitzgerald’s portraits that become ­Nicole and Rosemary in Tender Is the Night. Elaine Showalter in “Representing Ophelia” has demonstrated that each culture since the Elizabethan era has envisioned the Ophelia it has needed to craft a picture of female innocence and also contamination: “she is the ‘green girl’ of pastoral, the virginal ‘Rose of May’ and the sexually explicit madwoman who, in giving away her wild flowers and herbs, is symbolically deflowering herself.”2 These three identities for Ophelia could well describe the characters of ­Nicole, ­Rosemary, and the Eczema Woman, respectively, with attendant overlap from the popu­lar cultural spectacle each presents to the reader within an early twentieth-­ century context of psychiatry, cinema, and feminism. Hamlet’s enormously suggestive plot lines, thematics, and language for Ophelia provided a secure literary background for Fitzgerald’s creation of ­Nicole at several key junctures and solved a continuing problem for him in Tender: how to “do” ­Nicole’s madness as part of a tragic romance and leave out the facts of Z ­ elda’s life and condition as much as he could. Nicole and Rosemary are both depicted through repeated reconceptions of Ophelia’s songs, flowers, and associations with water. The “flowers [that] lay in iron fingers” (183) in the clinic is where Fitzgerald’s ­Nicole-­as-­Ophelia confronts madness in specific construction and design problems. The black lace of Dick’s bathing drawers (21) and filigree work for the sanitarium bars (183) fulfill a kind of singing-­in-­chains for ­Nicole within the sexual trauma engendered by her father. Fitzgerald references the lineaments of Shakespeare’s heroine in her desperation at becoming the erotic and filial pawn of the mad sexual and family romance in Hamlet. Ophelia does not understand Hamlet’s cruelty that has caused her own devastation. She performs her madness in three specific scenes in Act IV, scenes v and vii of Hamlet, which feature her songs, flowers, and garlanding of willow branches above the stream that finally bears her away. Her grieving songs are specifically sung to her brother Laertes (IV, v., l. 164–98). As she sings for their dead father, she bears rosemary for remembrance (IV, v, l. 175); Fitzgerald pointedly depicts the Rosemary who feels the Diver beach day will be the one that will always “pop up” in her memory at the mention of swimming—not ­Ophelia’s strong suit. Fitzgerald overwrites Rosemary’s comfort in the Mediterranean waters set against Ophelia’s being taken by the stream: “the water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped into her hair and ran into the corners of her body,” where he depicts her “embracing [the water], wallowing in it” (5). When ­Nicole runs madly through the Agiri Fair in Switzerland in Book Two, Fitzgerald envisions “the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water, seeping through, over and around a dike” (191– 92). As ­Nicole flees, she rides on a ferris wheel where she becomes the spectacle.

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“Regardez donc cette Anglais,” says the crowd looking up at her, “Look at that English woman!” Look at a mad Ophelia perhaps? Fitzgerald describes Dick spotting ­Nicole in “the top boat of the wheel . . . laughing hilariously” as down she dropped (189). It is as if ­Nicole drops down (falls through the branches of ) the wheel. All eyes are on ­Nicole, as they are on Ophelia every time she enters the court at Elsinore. Ophelia also strews pansies for thought (IV, v, l. 175–76); Fitzgerald transposes these into McKisco’s charge at the Divers for the “pansy’s trick” of the bath­ing drawers (21), which truly should be leveled at seamstress ­Nicole. Dick Diver’s urgency and need to save her and thus to constantly “save” the two dead sis­ters can be seen in the plot outlines of Hamlet as follows: Ophelia comes unhinged after her “lover” Hamlet has impulsively killed her father Polonius in his displaced fury toward his mother Gertrude and his uncle Claudius. The burden falls on Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, for whom she is a wronged sister who must be saved and then finally avenged. Hamlet and Laertes both feel the constant pressure of the “mother” Gertrude. She and Claudius are the spectators and interrogators of Ophelia’s madness and Laertes’ umbrage. Furthermore, Hamlet hints about a possible violation of Ophelia by Claudius and thus his need for Ophelia to be eliminated; it also suggests perhaps a paternal rape of Ophelia by Polonius, in which case the familiar plot outline of Tender could be recognized. Fitzgerald may well have intuited Hamlet and Ophelia in an extreme Freudian interpretation: “two parallel male and female psychodramas, the counterpointed stories of the incestuous attachments of Hamlet and Ophelia” (Showalter 90). Fitzgerald borrowed Ophelia to tell the story of Dick’s rise and fall and engage his own sentimental needs to save and seduce. Dick is as much a Laertes as a Hamlet, as much an outraged brother at a father and sister’s death as he is a resentful lover. Each member of Shakespeare’s younger generation in Hamlet is perhaps “played” by Gertrude and Claudius, those murky and powerful fig­ures of maternal and paternal lust. In the first of her song scenes, Ophelia responds to them with suggestive lines that are laced with sexual and paternal innuendo and grieving that indirectly indict both Claudius and Hamlet. When Claudius explains that her speaking is “Conceit upon her father” (IV, v., l. 45), she answers:



Pray let’s have no words of this, but when They ask you what it means, say you this. Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day. (Song) All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine. (IV, v., l. 45–51)

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Ophelia references Hamlet but boldly addresses Claudius. Recall ­Nicole’s keening to Dick about what she would be forced to wear on All Fools Day (April 1)— the blood-­red coverlet/domino of her violation certainly shows her as bending all her experience to her fixation (“conceit upon her father”). When ­Nicole tells Dick, “It’s you!” (Tender 112), he has in effect become her father. Ophelia’s tone immediately darkens in her sec­ond song to the king and queen: By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame! Young men will do’t if they come to’t, By cock, they are to blame. Q uoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed.’ (IV, v., l. 58–63) The registers of her songs are of both innocence and experience with explicit wordplay on maidenhood and seduction. Hamlet, who has murdered her father, is now addressed as faithless. Thus in addressing the twin obsessions of her alarm— the dead father and her lover, the murderer—Ophelia’s songs certainly may have influenced Fitzgerald in his portrayal of ­Nicole in her seductive and traumatized poses; it’s not only Ophelia’s “flowers” that capture his imagination but the paternal and sexual scandals of the court that give rise to the “House” of the Warrens and its scandal.3 In their first innocent encounters in the sanitarium, ­Nicole plays popu­lar tunes on her phonograph to vamp Dick in a perfect example of how Fitzgerald sof­tens and romanticizes Ophelia’s bawdiness for his purposes. Ophelia croons about the horrors of mixing fathers, lovers, and seduction. ­Nicole’s ditties are “thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison” (136); they are from America’s “harlot’s mind,” as she continues to pepper Dick with pop lines. “They were in America now” through the lyrics, and Fitzgerald imagines a whole arc of a plot solely through collaging the lyrics that refract off each other’s surfaces: “They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarreled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care—yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad” (135–36). The lightly explicit love songs are perhaps ­Nicole’s pop counterparts to Ophelia’s “low” lyrics, which also include the famous vocal bridge of “hey non nonny, hey nony” (IV, v, l. 165), so featured in Much Ado About Nothing. ­Nicole is a “scarcely saved waif of disaster” singing to Dick in the idiom of “the essence of a continent.” A “waif of disaster” describes Ophelia very well; the

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“scarcely saved” descriptives are Fitzgerald’s altering to a rescue for ­Nicole, who unlike Ophelia survives the family traumas, with her “moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world” (Tender 134). For ­Nicole to create the black lace drawers on the beach and the asylum bars’ containment is to garland madness, to decorate the sexual crime of the fathers, to practice the female’s art expressing her violation. That was ultimately Ophelia’s fate as well, her songs and flowers detailing her grief and bewildered outrage at Hamlet’s mind and actions. Fitzgerald formulates the range of Ophelia’s behavior that he wishes ­Nicole to represent when he writes that the young “she [­Nicole] was a carnival to watch— at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips” (149). Much of Ophelia’s emotional fluctuation can be heard in this description, from her flirtations to her suicidal depression. ­Nicole is always an idealized schizophrenic seen through brief mad episodes that interrupt a beautiful and decorous façade, which hides her role as a sad and inscrutable victim. ­Nicole slowly comes alive out of the (ominous) willow trees of Ophelia: “Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her, out of the willow trees, out of the dark world” (136). ­Nicole as an oxymoronic Ophelia is “new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant” (155). “Draining,” “flowing,” “drowning,” “engulfed”— Fitzgerald converts Ophelia’s watery death to a birth and rebirth for ­Nicole. Young ­Nicole in Switzerland had desired to be “a feather again instead of a plummet to float and not to drag” (149), perhaps a reference to Ophelia’s drowning and ­Nicole’s difference from her. Earlier as the enchanted funicular ascends the Swiss mountain, the Dorothy Perkins roses, “blossoms trail[ing],” brush through each compartment like a romantic dusting, just as ­Nicole drops breathlessly into Dick’s car, lining the compartment for their romantic “meet” with “flowers.” ­Nicole labors long over her flower garden (25–29) and ultimately for Tommy, “her ego began blooming like a great rich rose . . .” (289). Through the Ophelia line of imagery, Fitzgerald effectively locked up ­Nicole within the text, “rilling out” enough of the domestic arts to her to effectively underscore her symbolic imprisonment and its meaning. Fitzgerald thus refig­ured Ophelia’s flowers and songs to fit his romance. Gertrude recounts Ophelia’s drowning in the brook and her art of flowers:



There is a willow grows askant the brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream, Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Or crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them,

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There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds Clamb’ring to hang an envious sliver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. (Hamlet IV, vii, l. 166–75) Fitzgerald certainly appears to have envisioned both Rosemary and ­Nicole through the lines of Ophelia’s last moments in the willow branches above the brook. ­Ophelia’s bower with “long purples” that shepherds give a “grosser name” shows her making phallic shapes (­Nicole and the drawers) called dead men’s “fingers” by maids (shriveled phalluses?). Ophelia falls through the flowering branches into the flowing brook, the physical equivalent of the evasive narrative of Daddy’s Girl, which absolves Daddy of everything but love for his daughter. Ophelia is fiercely implicated with “Daddy” and his surrogates (the dead P ­ olonius, Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius) at the Danish court while Rosemary is content to be the object of the undifferentiated (male) gaze on screen. Finally, as ­Ophelia falls through the boughs into the brook, she sings “as one incapable of her own distress”; like mad ­Nicole kneeling by the bathtub (her brook) in Book One, they are both lost to themselves, keening in self-­regard and grief (112). As has been discussed in Chapter 3, Rosemary cheerfully identifies with the flowering tree that is a garlanded phallus. “The girl” for Fitzgerald is the raw material to be “dressed” with whatever he can absorb for the sentimental romance. When Dick gives his acting “lesson” to Rosemary in Book Three, he distinguishes between what happens when “you’re told your lover is dead,” that in life “you’d probably go to pieces” but on the stage “you’re trying to entertain” so you “get the audience’s attention back on [your]self ” (288). After her bawdy singing that half-­hurls accusations, Ophelia maneuvers the audience from the fact of Polonius’ death and “slides into character again” as the grieving lost daughter. ­Nicole-­as-­Ophelia doesn’t want the acting lesson of “performing” intolerable grief whereas Rosemary, the blooming innocent actress, doesn’t “get it.”4 Fitzgerald specifically mentions Ophelia when Dick thinks that early on in Dohmler’s clinic, “he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it” (302). Fitzgerald may have seen Ophelia as his exiled female half of Hamlet if his own familiar self-­analy­sis—“I am half-­feminine, that is my mind is”—is applied here. Ophelia is mightily overshadowed by Hamlet, which is just what Fitzgerald chooses for Dick over ­Nicole. If it was “better” for Fitzgerald to seize on Ophelia, he settled for what was, after Shakespeare, the familiar view of female madness depicted as erotomania in women. The representation of Ophelia continued through the centuries; Fitzgerald wrests the female hysteric back from what he deemed Faulkner’s and Krafft-­Ebing’s more distasteful

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clutches while still captivated by her incestuous family themes. Ophelia is Fitzgerald’s quintessential “lost girl”—daughter, sister, lover—one whom he simply could not let die given his narrative pressures to revisit (and save) the fig­ure of “the girl” again and again in Tender.

Co-­Doctoring as Narrative Strategy Other discourses besides Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy and Ophelia factor into the portrayal of madness in Tender. Scott Fitzgerald had a role for ­Zelda as the diagnosed schizophrenic, distilling certain qualities into ­Nicole Warren Diver. He wanted to represent madness but absorb only some of ­Zelda’s symptoms and those according to specific narrative lines he would lay down. How did he analyze ­Zelda’s mental illness and how does that analy­sis play itself out in images and scenes in Tender? The long-­delayed completion of Tender Is the Night was very much bound up with Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional management of ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s illness as displayed through the character of ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman. Only by centering his heroine as a paternal rape victim saved by her marriage to a psychiatrist did Fitzgerald see his way clear to write Books Two and Three of Tender in about eighteen months, between 1932–34. The many versions of the Tender manuscript that had for years been stalled in the much-­refashioned scenes of the Riviera and Paris in Book One would finally have two central tragic ­fig­ures—a husband/doctor and wife/patient—in a wounding love story. Dick and ­Nicole Diver were hardly more extreme creations than were the actual lives of Scott and ­Zelda Fitzgerald during this period of prolonged marital stress for the Fitzgeralds, which involved ­Zelda’s repeated breakdowns and Scott’s own instabilities. Their story is quite well known through in­di­vidual biographies that have carried the banner for one character or another or in joint studies.5 ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s own narrative of this period emerges from many sources in­clud­ing her novel Save Me the Waltz, her quicksilver letters and incisive comments to her doctors, and her different artistic forays into ballet, painting, and fiction. She also has become the Ameri­can poster-­wife for the star-­crossed woman of talent in a marriage to a male modernist of great talent and ambition. She can be found at the edges of surrealism and the künstlerroman as the madwoman seeking an art of her own, a mis­ diagnosed schizophrenic who only needed to get her work done, the brilliant but destructive half of “the Fitzgeralds.”6 ­Zelda possessed formidable resources that were worked up by Scott in his portrait of ­Nicole. Parts of Save Me the Waltz may be read selectively against Tender to ascertain aspects of both texts in a surrealistic fictional ethic. Such readings would complicate the arts of writing, painting, and dance in the Fitzgeralds’ battle for artistic and emotional control; they complete

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the perspectives on the creation of ­Nicole Warren Diver within and against the aura of ­Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. This is a subject for its own study. Although ­Nicole physically descends from Sara Murphy in the early drafts of Tender Is the Night, the manuscripts before the Diver versions beginning in 1932 lack any real fashioning of the ­Nicole Warren character. Fitzgerald in the late 1920s had not yet been stunned by the years-­long struggle of and with Z ­ elda, nor with the drain of their energies over the rights to creativity within their marriage and fiction. The character of ­Nicole would finally grow out of this desperate state by wedding the trace of the two sisters already discussed to the urgent present quandary in 1932 through 1934 of saving and/or controlling ­Zelda through saving his novel. Tender Is the Night is finally a creative act of both containment and completion. Scott Fitzgerald attempted to write himself into an imagined position of medi­ cal authority for Z ­ elda Fitzgerald. ­Zelda’s doctors included many of the major fig­ures in the hierarchy of early twentieth-century Swiss psychiatry; Scott proposed to vault Dick Diver into their midst as colleague. Prangin’s resident path­ olo­gist on ­Zelda’s case beginning in June 1930 was Oscar Forel (1891–1982), the son of Auguste Forel (1848–1931), an eminent Swiss neuropathologist who had been superintendent of the Burgholzi Asylum in Zurich until 1898, when he was succeeded by Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) who was superintendent at Burgholzi until 1927. Carl Jung was an assistant under Bleuler in the early 1900s. Bleuler invented the term “schizophrenia” in 1912 and was called in to consult on Z ­ elda’s case in No­vem­ber 1930. It comes as no surprise that he confirmed Oscar Forel’s “schizophrenic” diagnosis; he was also of the opinion that ­Zelda “must submit to a master who had to be a doctor” (Cline 287), thereby partially enabling Scott’s later creation of Dick Diver. Auguste Forel had been in contact with Ameri­ can medical societies in Boston since the 1880s. Z ­ elda’s institutionalization in America began in 1932. Her lead doctor at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was Adolf Meyer (1866–1950), a Swiss émigré who moved to the United States in 1892 and had studied with Forel. Meyer practiced neurology and taught at the University of Chicago and at Phipps from 1910 to 1941. He shaped much of early Ameri­can psychiatry by introducing Emil Krapaelin’s classificatory sys­tem of mental illnesses as well as Freud’s ideas; he also presented Jung’s earliest researches in America. Thus there was a powerful connection between Swiss and Ameri­can psychology and psychiatry that went back decades before the Fitzgeralds encountered ­Zelda’s clinical treatment regimens and interpretations and before Scott sought to complete Tender Is the Night.7 In Tender, Scott mentions “the great Jung, bland, super-­vigorous” (195) and the leaders of early psychiatry as Dick’s peers. When Dr. Franz Gregorovius urges

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Dick to buy a clinic on the Zugersee with Baby Warren’s money, he tells him, “Consider it, Dick. . . . When one writes on psychiatry, one should have actual clinical contacts. Jung writes, Bleuler writes, Freud writes, Forel writes” (176). Fitzgerald laces Book Two with such psychiatric name-­dropping and places Dick in their (writerly) company. After Yale, Dick is a Rhodes Scholar in 1914 and returns home for “a year at Hopkins” (115) (perhaps in Fitzgerald’s imagining, studying with Adolf Meyer) before going to Vienna in 1916 and writing the scientific papers that were the “backbone” of the book he published in 1920 at age twenty-­nine. Fitzgerald alternately portrayed Dick Diver as brilliant and a quick study. His small tome “A Psychology for Psychiatrists” sets the bar for him but he never finishes anything else, becoming a classifier and subdivider (146) whose projected title of a new work looks so overblown and monstrous in German that Fitzgerald must write it out in an amused footnote (146).8 Franz appraises him by saying “you have the same stupid and unchanging Ameri­can face, except that I know you’re not stupid, Dick” (119) and that “soon you will be writing little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman’” (138). When Dick becomes erratic in his work, Franz, however, defends him to his wife Kaethe, for “Dick is more brilliant than I could ever be” and “I turn to Dick when cases are highly involved” for “his publications are still standard in their line” (241). Dick Diver is thus presented as a promising clinician, yet he always seems on the edge of a certain suspect facility in thinking. Scott was vicariously basking through Franz’s acclaim of Dick, not at all shy in ascribing fame to Dick in another genre. But who might Franz Gregorovius be? He is certainly Oscar Forel, son of Auguste Forel. Fitzgerald puts him in the line of psychiatric royalty: “he was the third of the Gregoroviuses—his grandfather had instructed Krapaelin when psychiatry was just emerging from the darkness of all time. . . . If the resident genius of the family had grown a little tired, Franz would without doubt become a fine clinician” (119). Scott casts Franz as dimmer than Dick’s star, steady, a balance wheel. In effect, Franz and Dohmler (himself modeled on the elder Forel and Bleuler) give ­Nicole, case and all, to Dick. He becomes, after only three years in Zurich, the one to whom she is entrusted, achieving the absolute power in the novel over ­Nicole’s treatment, mirroring the loss of power that Scott felt in real life during 1932 and 1933 regarding Z ­ elda’s treatment. Dick thinks, “the thing had drifted into his hands” (139), but it’s more in the realm of a popu­lar seduction in fiction than a grave deliberation and professional consult. Scott, always sensing the high and popu­lar contradictions about himself and his work, creates Dick Diver as the sort of analyst he would have been: mercurial, humanistic, romantic, a popu­larizer, and a quick study. Once ­Nicole is Dick’s wife, there is never again any true consultation between Dick and the Swiss psychiatrists about her case, even though there is no actual

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technical transfer of her case to him. However, in 1932–33 after the Fitzgeralds had returned to America and Z ­ elda had broken down again, Fitzgerald himself becomes the focal point of Dr. Meyer’s attention, as they feint and parry over ­Zelda’s treatment. The issue becomes one of taking Scott off her case, not the fictional wish-­fulfillment of awarding ­Nicole to Dr. Diver in Tender. Oscar Forel recommended Meyer to the Fitzgeralds and ­Zelda was admitted to Phipps on February 12, 1932, five months after her release from Prangin’s in Switzerland. ­Zelda completed Save Me the Waltz during her first two months at Phipps; it is published later that year on Oc­to­ber 7 (Cline 320). This feat of bringing her writing so quickly to conclusion had to jolt Scott as much as her potentially using “their” material: she had amazingly gotten her work done and produced a finished manuscript while he still grappled with Tender’s fragments. ­Zelda’s manuscript provoked a perfect storm of private and professional resentments in Scott. Meyer writes to Forel in De­cem­ber 1932 that Scott is declining under the cumulative effects of alcohol plus luminal. Scott began to confide to Meyer how he could control his wife’s mental health or illness absolutely, that he could “reduce ­Zelda to hysteria through a ‘well-­planned conversation’ in which he would suggest that he was interested in some other woman; such a comment would bring on her insanity again” (Wagner-Martin 165). Such fantasies of Scott’s power to torment ­Zelda undoubtedly provoked Meyer to challenge Scott’s control of ­Zelda’s treatment in April 1933: “the question of authority is simple. We have decided to relieve you of having to be the boss in any detailed way.” By this juncture, Scott and ­Zelda had both been seeing therapists at Phipps for six months; Meyer knew he might be dealing with a sec­ond patient in Scott (Wagner-­Martin 166). Thus Scott writes of Dick’s decline in Tender’s Books Two and Three while in a steep descent of his own.9 Having failed to change his role in Z ­ elda’s treatment, Scott responded with the one sure compensation at his command: the control in his fiction of the psychiatric milieu that was dictating to him during the nightmare of ­Zelda’s incarceration.

The Eczema Diagnosis: Scott Fitzgerald’s Letters on ­Zelda’s Symptoms and Treatment The whole arc of Scott’s feelings toward ­Zelda is on display in the letters he writes to her doctors beginning in Janu­ary 1931 relating his theory about the source of her illness as it had progressed through 1930. Fitzgerald experienced mood swings from confidence in his intellect and rhetoric at having ferreted out “truths” about her illness to despair as to whether he can do or say anything to save Z ­ elda or himself. The letters are agonizingly insecure and manipulative, simulating oneness with ­Zelda; just as of­ten, they are Olympian and cold. They are the letters of

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both a persuasive patient who is self-­diagnosing and a “doctor” suggesting treatment and hoping to persuade through several rhetorics. They show his agitated mind making analogical points about ­Zelda and himself concerning madness, writing, and writerly professionalism. Finally, Scott’s letters as arranged by Bruccoli reproduce the loss of confidence that Dick Diver experiences in his ability to do anything for ­Nicole in Tender. Fitzgerald wants to impress ­Zelda’s doctors that he, too, is finding patterns in the “text” in his and Z ­ elda’s story, not only in what he believes is his similarity to their clinical science but also what he unconsciously senses is their similarity to him as authors. In this heartfelt and sad kinship is a remarkably firm basis for the relation of literature and psychoanaly­sis as well. In his Janu­ary 1931 letter to Dr. Oscar Forel, Scott begins confidently, “Af­ter this afternoon [a visit to ­Zelda] I am all the more interested in my own theory.” He airily states, “despite my terminological ignorance I think you’ll see I’m really not just guessing” and “I am assuming with you and with Dr. Bleuler that the homosexuality is merely a symbol—something she invented to fill her slowly developing schizophrenie. Now let me plot the course of her illness according to my current idea.” Scott then embarks on a close reading of her behavior and its changes, detailing the year 1930 and beginning with a capsule of Z ­ elda’s behavior and symptoms, ages 15–29. The chronicle is very much in the vein of a novelist’s plotting out successive chronological sections for a created character; here we are eighteen months from Scott’s “General Plan” for Tender. The consistent thematic figuration that drives this letter is Scott’s perception of the physical manifestations of ­Zelda’s eczema, which he closely links to her emotional eruptions and their specific occasions. He writes with heavy emphasis that ­Zelda “began dancing at age 27 and had two severe attacks of facial eczema cured by electric ray treatment” (emphasis Fitzgerald). She then began to feel unwell and had her metabolism checked. Scott cites August 1928 as the date of her first mention of “homosexual fears” about Scott that “coincides with complete and never entirely renewed break of confidence with husband” (Life in Letters 204). Through 1929 and early 1930, Scott writes of Z ­ elda’s “extraordinary sweating” during her dancing workouts, a collapse, rest period at Malmaison, and quick physical recovery; finally in June and July 1930, “hysteria” confines her to Eglantine at Prangin’s with “virulent eczema” (205). Scott’s theory of “tocsins” and “nerves” fostering eczema is rooted in an explanation of affect. Having been more of a clinical observer of Z ­ elda’s condition, he now wants “to insert [his] idea,” which is that Z ­ elda’s “origi­nal nervous biting, followed by the need to sweat might indicate some lack of normal elimination of poison. This uneliminated poison attacks the nerves” (205). He then curiously analogizes her eczema reaction to his own “mild eczema” after hard drinking when he would “eliminate toxins through the skin.” He asks, “(Isn’t there an especially in-

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timate connection between the skin and the nerves, so that they share together the distinction of being the things we know least about?) Suppose the skin by sweating eliminated as much as possible of this poison, the nerves took on the excess— then the breakdown came, and due to the exhaustion of the sweat glands the nerves had to take it all, but at the price of a gradual change in their structure as a unit” (205–06). Intriguingly, Scott imagines ­Zelda’s sys­tem operating as his would under alcoholism, thus binding them together: “the mind of the confirmed alcoholic accepts a certain poisoned condition of the nerves” (Scott/Dick drinking the “sweet poison” of Ophelia, perhaps), while “Mrs. Fitzgerald encourages her nervous sys­tem to absorb the continually distilled poison.” Her “will toward reality” thus “force[s] this poison out of the nerve cells” and its elimination “is taken over again by her skin” (206). Scott concludes that every time ­Zelda is “shamed,” the eczema is a manifestation of a resultant will toward reality, that her sys­tem is “trying to live in equilibrium.” The eczema is then, oddly, a sign of questing after health, a move toward what Scott so cherishes in Tender, a “balance” that ­Nicole must strive for, one that Dick ultimately loses. ­Zelda’s eczema and its “timing” are clinical puzzles for Scott and a lynchpin symptom of his physiological theories about her. In Tender, Scott links the Eczema Woman’s quest for self-­knowledge and sexual free­dom to her disfig­ured, encrusted war body—another victim of (a) Great War between men and women. The Eczema Woman is only her symptoms linked to those of the modern world— she is never allowed to practice her art or be questioned about it. She has no lover or sexual past except that which is hinted about and is nominally in her brother’s care (perfect for Scott’s “sisters” narrative). The creation of the anonymous Eczema Woman was a devastating—albeit perhaps unconscious—revenge upon ­Zelda as painted by Scott; it is also the most visceral feature of Z ­ elda’s suffering that Scott borrowed for his work. The matrix of power-­control-­eczema on the part of the husband-­writer-­doctor suggests a therapeutic chaos in which Dick Diver’s pious reply to the Eczema Woman “we must all try to be good” is a genteel cover-­up and retreat into another “vicious sentimentality.” Scott sums up his theory and analy­sis of the eczema by grandiosely suggesting that ­Zelda “behav[ing] badly” at his visit engenders her “effort to think” before another visit by him; “immediate eczema” is the result (206). When “sunk safely in her insane self,” the eczema does not appear. Finally, Scott’s conclusions are that what she needs includes “renewal of full physical relations with her husband,” timed only to periods just before and after menstruation, surmising that “constipation or delayed menstruations or lack of real exercise” will always cause eczema in her. As always Scott wants to find the positive ray of light in ­Zelda’s behavior and illness, that the eczema is a “good sort” of agitation and shows her wanting to be well. He urges Dr. Forel to write him whether he agrees at all and

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trails off into queries about whether ­Zelda’s eyes have been examined and whether she has enough warm underwear. He concludes in a wished-­for fantasy of control of­t en adopted in the letters that “after lunch” he could have “maneuvered her into intercourse but the eczema was almost visibly increasing so [he] left early” (207). The visible eczema that Scott “reads” is converted by him into a sexual and textual determinant of Z ­ elda’s behavior; he extends this imagery into the construction of ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman. Judith Halberstam in Skin Shows comments that Gothic novels “dwell upon the unnatural relations between inside and outside” and “turn bodies and minds inside out in their search for monstrosities,” and that these novels create subjects who produce “pathological versions of themselves through extreme self-­evaluation” (71–72). The Eczema Woman wonders at her punishment as her mind scans her body’s torture. ­Nicole sees the bars at the clinic as “disciplines” in her imagination to aestheticize her “punishment.” Fitzgerald has found ways to both discipline and punish these two women. Eczema’s “moral nature” according to Scott’s theory is that you “wear” the poisons you are excreting. Eric Rasmussen has identified Lynne Tillman’s Ameri­can Genius: A Comedy (2006) as a novel deeply committed to biowriting, where skin functions as a major part of the body’s communication sys­tem and is intricately wired to forms of affect (Rasmussen 168). Rasmussen dubs this sys­tem a “skintax,” one that “affects non-­conscious sensations of intensity, a range of cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and perception” (175). Tillman’s protagonist and narrator Helen is repeatedly fascinated with reading emotions and people through skin as a “parchment for the body” (Tillman 32).10 We “read” skin as knowledge to human health, sickness, bliss, anger, age, texture, and desire—a full range of human intensities. Scott is most interested in what he can absorb from other ­bodies and then leave them out, but he also obsessively focuses on what Z ­ elda’s body excretes as he links it to her rebellion and desires. The Eczema Woman erupts in scabs and blushes and Dick analyzes why her skin “fails” her. When the Eczema Woman calls herself “a symbol of something” (Tender 185), Fitzgerald has her probe for the social justification for her agony, its mind, body, and spirit “relationality”— in short, its sentiment.11 In a letter written in the spring of 1932, Scott is clearly rattled by the improb­ able appearance of Save Me the Waltz, which ­Zelda wrote in a burst of creativity over six weeks (February–March 1932) and sent directly to Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald has shifted from analy­sis of her eczema to acute anxiety about ­Zelda’s writing and the ways in which it was affecting him and his work. He concluded, “She has perhaps achieved something fairly good, at everybody’s cost all around, in­clud­ing mine” (212). The unfairness of their relative situations is what most distresses him, the fact that Z ­ elda’s writing for “therapy” now has achieved the “power of arousing sympathy.” This is an irony for Scott since he is so consumed

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with creating a sentimental “heart going out” for his hero Dick Diver, while he can see no sympathy by anyone for himself.12 Scott then abruptly shifts to intimate sexual details of their marriage, defensively stating that ­Zelda had almost always been orgasmic with him; he adds, almost as an afterthought, that ­Zelda was a “rather polygamous type” with a “touch of mental lesbianism” (213). His litany of symptoms, syndromes, and physical changes in ­Zelda is clearly almost rote in this letter; he’s no longer in the hunt for a cure; instead, he’s fixated on his own need to work. What he fears most is that ­Zelda is speculating on writing another novel about, as she says, “our personal quarrel and her insanity” (213) and he simply cannot imagine a text which will cut ever closer to their lives and Tender’s subject matter. Near the end of his letter, he is almost plaintively asking to be considered as needing Drs. Squires and Meyer’s help for himself (“please I want to be told what you’ve considered and decided . . . I need advice for myself as the essentially responsible party”). He concludes yet again with the fantasy of co-­doctoring: “At present our collaboration is too vague. I don’t know my role and count on you to point it out to me” (214). There can be little doubt that his letters to Squires and Meyer must have been subject for much of their discussion about the dynamics between the Fitzgeralds as well as Scott’s possible delusions about his medical status. Žižek writes of Fitzgerald’s “formal” narrative failure and oscillation between the two versions (1934, 1951) of Tender (PV 19). I would align that “failure and oscillation” with the creative burst that actually writes the gap between Fitzgerald’s two major traumas—that of his birth after his sisters’ death and ­Zelda’s madness. The first made him a writer while the other dangerously impinged on his ability as a writer to finish his novel. He had to protect his material, stave off ­Zelda’s fiction, and continue his human—all too human—attempt to help save her, all of which demanded an impossible synthesis, as it was for Dick Diver in the fiction. Scott’s narrative problem indeed involved “collating the sentimen­ talities” but on a fraught narrative front, nothing less than the integration of the early childhood trauma with the adult marriage tragedy (Dick as doctor and husband, Dick’s biography, and Scott as author, husband, and “doctor” who would help treat ­Zelda). The two versions in another semantic row occur in what Žižek calls “traversing the fantasy,” between the pub­lic space—the “treatment” of ­Nicole and ­Zelda—and the “phantasmic kernel” (PV 30) of saving the sisters in the gap, in the curved space of parallax where refracted traumas generate the sentimental, the “saving” and mourning for self and sisters, and recompense of “having the girl,” leaving out the male, yet absorbing “him,” and dominating the woman, yet not violating her. All these strands form Fitzgerald’s emotional reactions which must be rewritten in the ­Nicole/­Zelda version of the fantasy. In Oc­to­ber 1932, Scott writes Dr. Rennie at Johns Hopkins in the aftermath of

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Save Me the Waltz’s publication (Oc­to­ber 7) that the situation has reduced itself to a “rather clear-­cut struggle of egos between Z ­ elda and myself ”; now he will tell the doctor “what is underneath it,” what “parallels last February” (219–20). He writes that he’s working hard on his novel. What he resents is that for five years, as he writes—“the two and a half of ballet and the two and a half of sickness”— that “she has come to regard me as the work horse and herself as the artist,” that she is a “producer of the finer things such as painting, uncommercial literature, ballet” while he has to do “the damn Post story writing.” He senses he has become the hack writer supporting the deluded mandarin artist, which to him is grossly unfair. Then he proceeds to his real astonishment: he described to Z ­ elda in February 1932 his plan to write about their eight years in Europe. He read her a chapter and “what did she do immediately on her arrival in the clinic but sit down and try to write it herself .” This was material he claims he had saved for years for his novel, by extension for his high art, not for the “damn” Post stories. He has become paranoid as he imagines Z ­ elda is becoming him in her work, for she has intuited his writings so “profoundly” “that she is saturated with them” and “whole fragments of my scenes and cadences come out in her work” (220). Here is another example of the panic and disgust of what “Dicole” would come to mean to Dick Diver, the way in which he and ­Nicole were suspended from each other with no in­di­vidual psychic integrity—it was “awful” (Tender 190). Scott insists he’s in an incestuous artistic marriage, which is repugnant to him; he rages against ­Zelda’s patient status and her writing as a privileged and unassailable right. In Scott’s imagination, ­Zelda becomes a perverse hack of a copyist who has already purloined his style and subject matter from within their life together. In Tender’s terms, the “harlot’s mind of America” was doing battle with his remaining “low fire of intelligence.” Scott continues to mirror his views about his own fiction when he says that her “stuff ” in her stories is “casually observed, unfelt phenomena” while his are “sections, debased, oversimplified” but “of my own soul.” Finally, Scott also displaces his fears onto ­Zelda: “She feels that my success has got to be, otherwise we all collapse—she feels also that it is a menace to her.” However, he also fears the success of her book even more, that “all my effort [on the Tender manuscript] be reduced to a scrap of paper.” He casts himself as the helpless one, reduced to a marker in her therapy, subject to the vagaries of her illness and its needs: “I am absolutely desperate and determined to finish it [Tender] without interference from ­Zelda, sane or insane” (221). ­Zelda’s written response to Scott in March 1932 as Waltz was being readied for publication is more measured and honest without embellishment (though she was not always capable of this much clarity and equanimity): “I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which

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I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write” (Collected Writings 468–69). In a letter to Dr. Meyer of April 10, 1933, Scott finally probes how he must seem to ­Zelda’s doctors. Bearing an uncanny relation to his portrait of the declining Dr. Diver, Scott is also going under. He has begun to imagine how he might look to an audience perusing his and ­Zelda’s story: “I will probably be carried off eventually by four strong guards shrieking manicly [sic] that after all I was right and she was wrong, while Z ­ elda is followed home by an adoring crowd in an automobile banked with flowers, and offered a vaudeville contract” (Cline 323). Thus Scott is clearly writing of Dick’s decline in Tender’s Books Two and Three while he is in a steep descent of his own. Dick himself is carried off shrieking in the novel after his battle with the Italian police in Rome at the end of Book Two. Scott also questions the boundaries of his authority: Will he be able to discipline ­Zelda? Can he count on the doctors’ support for him to tell her to “pack her bag and spend a week” in the clinic (229)? Scott deems it “impossible” for Z ­ elda to work “outside of the discipline of a clinic” (230), which is where Baby (and Dick) would keep ­Nicole. More and more, he seems to be conflating ­Zelda’s actual case with his own and the one he is crafting for ­Nicole and Dick. By substituting an analyst hero for himself as author, Scott has already set psychoanaly­sis and literature in a dialogue. All the positions he could craft for Dick and ­Nicole are refracted by those he writes for ­Zelda and himself within the gaze where sentiment is curved. As ­Zelda’s doctors dissected Scott’s role and dealt with his attempting to influence the treatment of their patient, it is possible that they had never faced the onslaught of such resourceful language from a patient’s relative. They appear to have viewed Scott—with his intellect and vivid narrative—as a case study in himself; just as of­ten, he must have been a formidable roadblock to their work with ­Zelda. Scott Fitzgerald keenly sensed the role that narrative played in analy­sis; it is easy to see how he wanted so much to be given an equal role in the making of a significant fiction that ­Zelda could live in, even as he desperately tried to clear space for his own. Failing that end, he moved to make a fiction for ­Nicole and Dick that would finally give Tender Is the Night its completed narrative arc.13

Scott and ­Zelda: “Collating the Sentimentalities” The riddle that Scott Fitzgerald and all proponents and critics of sentiment cannot solve is as follows: What is the quantifiable or intimate difference between our participation in another’s suffering “in the world,” as Z ­ elda Fitzgerald was

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demonstrably “in the world,” and the author’s and/or audience’s participation in another’s suffering in a novel or film? What are the writer’s needs to protect what he believes to be rights of representation of that suffering? Scott Fitzgerald in 1931–33 was on the edge of his own breakdown as he clung to his talent like a life raft. He had no sympathy for Z ­ elda desiring to write “her story”; he was a fierce protector of his prerogative as a novelist. The battle raging in him was about the need for her institutional well-­being and recovery set against his personal and professional needs. How to “collate the sentimentalities” (Tender 155)? Ascribing the phrase to lovely beleaguered ­Nicole in the high romance scene at Lake Geneva in the published novel (154–56) shows how desperately he felt her character to be writing him. In the April 1933 letter to Dr. Meyer, Scott offers to “make [them] a list in parallel lines,” listing Z ­ elda’s and ­Nicole’s cases, in effect “collating” the sentimentalities surrounding his life and his ongoing fiction. The letters to Z ­ elda’s doctors exist as the extension of Tender’s “General Plan” inscribed into Scott’s ledger in August 1932. Thus to a great degree, the novel manuscript and the letters become conflated imaginative constructs and difficult to separate. To understand Scott’s articulation of the circumstances of ­Zelda’s illness with those he projected for his character ­Nicole Warren Diver, it is instructive to interpret his handwritten sheet from the “General Plan,” which he entitled “Parallel between actual case and case in novel.”14 The attempt in these “Parallels” by Scott to fold ­Zelda’s life and symptoms into a heroine of his creation is a fiction of selectively arranged facts and interpretations; it is noteworthy that he never mentions her by name in the “Plan,” repressing the fictionalizing she is undergoing. He instrumentalizes her as a “character” for purposes of comparison. ­Zelda then vies with Scott for “success and power” in a real world. If this description is aligned with ­Nicole, “a girl of 15,” her “father complex” is under his control, “deliberately built up” by him, “a well-­screened degenerate.” The next set of parallels is brief and both confusing and revealing. Both characters have “collapsed.” The “Woman” is obsessively locked onto her husband who bears the full brunt of her projection (which for Scott describes ­Zelda and her writing). The “Girl’s” complex on the other hand colors everyone she meets with its force. With what we might consider a search for leverage, the “Woman” “invents homosexuality” as an accusation against her husband, while the “Girl” hides the fact of her “degenerate” father by making her assailant “unknown.” The “Woman” is somewhat vanquished in her “failing.” The “Girl” finally succumbs to her father, which makes no sense; her “invention of rape” is prior to her “rape.” The right edge of the grid remains blank for Scott in the largest boxes with huge question marks. Z ­ elda’s story was ongoing—he had yet to finish ­Nicole’s story as well.

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In this rigged set of parallels, we can see some broad outlines. First, Scott clearly equated homosexuality and rape in his imagination in ways that were yet to be worked out. It’s significant that in the “Plan,” Scott’s fictionalized “Woman,” the implied ­Zelda, gets to “invent” the homosexual “degeneracy” as a charge against her husband, but Scott can “invent” in his novel the “Girl’s” rape and the “invention” of a story to deflect the homosexual aura surrounding the sentiment that defines Dick. ­Zelda became a negative cause and justification for his writerly aggression. If the two sisters’ deaths had “made him a writer” in an uncanny sense, ­Zelda’s illness—which he cannot cure—and her potential writing of their life— which he cannot tolerate—threaten to seal him off from the personal compensations of saving the sisters, his deepest rationales for art. Therefore Scott relies on his “author-­ity” in creating ­Nicole Diver as someone to “save” so that Dick may retain his own psychic space and achieve coherence. In the narrative portions of the “General Plan,” the projected treatment of ­Nicole was more sensational and melodramatic than it would be in the published novel. First raped by her father, she is only saved by her transference to the young doctor who keeps her from reverting to her “homicidal mania” of killing men, presumably because of her father’s abuse. Yet she is an “innocent” with no “experience” or “orientation” except what is doled out to her—the confluence of her author and doctor/husband is palpable (Mizener 347). Thus the melodramatic sweep of the plot was to have sensationalized ­Nicole into a victim who became a murderess with a husband who sentimentally covered for her. “The heroine’s” sensational past here seems severed from the Fitzgeralds’ lives and from Z ­ elda’s own experience, wit, and sensibility. The unacknowledged narrative containment of ­Zelda imagined in Scott’s impulsive transactions in the “General Plan” for Tender appears to be on the order of, “Accuse me of being gay and threaten to take my fictional material? I’ll make you a raped daughter and a murderess in a sensational plot and then save you to boot!” Logically, the fig­ure of ­Nicole would block that of ­Zelda by replicating her without her painting, ballet, or fiction writing. Scott has “the Woman” (­Zelda) and “the Girl” (­Nicole) where he wants them imaginatively. “Better Ophelia and Her Flowers” will mightily tilt ­Nicole toward “the girl,” to perhaps a dead “sister,” and away from the thirty-­year-­old ­Zelda, the incarcerated “woman.” Thus Scott Fitzgerald’s “own story, spinning out inside him” (Tender 300) dictated certain powerful moves in the Tender narrative in a dynamic that Bruccoli has called one of “self-­pity and self-­contempt” on Fitzgerald’s part (Grandeur 341). However, as she so of­ten did, ­Zelda fought through their rancor and instability to render her opinion in her fragmentary Caesar’s Things, most likely written beginning in 1933 (Cline 389). Her heroine Nanno says about her husband, “Jacob’s policy concerning women was that they were charming unless they

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tried to exercise authority. Jacob literally could not stand a woman’s prerogative: to him women were agents of his own grace.” She goes on to say that Jacob hated his sister and his mother and couldn’t find out why he resented them. Thus later he blamed Janno for the same reason, for the failure of his life (Wagner-­Martin 202–03). Such was ­Zelda’s late bid to draw her parallels between Scott’s “case” and the husband-­hero in her work-­in-­progress. The one narrative document from this period that the Fitzgeralds both in effect sign their names to is the powerful 114-page transcript of their hours-­long marathon “dialogue” with Dr. Thomas Rennie and a stenographer at La Paix in Maryland on May 28, 1933. It is their antagonistic realistic fiction, their shared prose (set against Dick’s “own story” in Tender). The dialogue is one in which love, writing, support, mental health, insanity, abuse, work, and reputation are hurled like blows, only to leave the weary, bitter Fitzgeralds at their origi­nal sad and wounding impasse. It is an occasion where ­Zelda has a strong and courageous voice, though the occasion is heavily managed by Dr. Rennie and by Scott. She, after all, is incarcerated and does not have their “rights” and is obviously careful about saying anything that will harm her even further. Scott is desperate and frantic whereas ­Zelda is wary and cornered. ­Zelda correctly diagnoses that “what is the matter with Scott is that he has not written that book [Tender] and if he will ever get it written, why he won’t feel as miserable and suspicious and mean towards everybody else”; she exclaims, “It is impossible to live with you. I would rather be in an insane asylum where you would like to put me.” Scott rails against the caliber of ­Zelda’s talent and trumpets his own reputation. ­Zelda snaps his anger back at him: “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third-­rate talent, then. . . . Why in the hell you are so jealous, I don’t know. If I thought that about anybody I would not care what they wrote” (Epic Grandeur 349, 351–52). Scott has no faith that anything she says or promises will come to pass. The scene in Book Three in Tender in which ­Nicole comes upon Dick acting out in solitary performance and then confronts him (300–01) is perhaps the imagined, condensed version of Scott and ­Zelda’s May 1933 novella-­length dialogue. In Tender, Dick is trying to save himself and his married life; Scott saw that the only way to do that for himself would be to salvage his writing from ­Zelda. He tells her at La Paix, “You’re a third-­rate writer and a third-­rate ballet dancer,” and adds, “I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest paid short-­story writer in the world,” whereupon ­Zelda, clear-­eyed, replies, “I am perfectly sure I can write, and he knows that, too, or he would not be raising so much hell about it” (Cline 325–26, 333). ­Zelda paints her ballet dancers in agonized positions in her studio at La Paix in 1933 while Scott is completing Tender Is the Night one floor below. Z ­ elda might

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3. Scott and Z ­ elda grimly arrive at a formal function, Baltimore, 1931. (c) Bettmann/Corbis.

have written her own stark account of her treatment for the eczema that included her being forcibly restrained, drugged and subjected to many invasive treatments of the sores covering her head-­to-­foot (Cline 270–72; Wagner-­Martin 132). She also might have written the sort of dark, hallucinatory narratives that surrealist women such as Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn later chronicled in vivid descriptions of their sanitarium treatment and visions while they were in artistic and personal union with male surrealist artists.15 They wrote vividly about the world of the clinic and about the abuse of their own bodies and spirit through their illness as enabling metaphor. Certainly Scott warned ­Zelda against attempting just such literary work and tried to censor it. Scott’s letter to Z ­ elda demanding specific cuts in the Waltz manuscript has “gone missing” as has a record of his revisions in March 1932 to which she responded with a strong and principled letter: “I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless le-

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gitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write” (Cline 309). ­Zelda Fitzgerald was usually too wearied and wary a sufferer to exude this painful intellectualized bitterness. She knew that any possible autonomy for her in the world depended on a diagnosis of “well” or at least “improving” on the part of her doctors and her husband. Sentiment is a current that flows unevenly between author and reader, spectator and suffering subject, one that must involve self-­serving, emotional overtures and responses. In the case of Scott Fitzgerald and the Tender manuscripts, he moved to protect the fiction that could both objectively “save” ­Zelda (through the market, his earnings to pay for treatment, and his reputation) and save himself from ­Zelda; this work included his fantasy of co-­ doctoring that he propounded to ­Zelda’s analysts and deftly wrote into Tender as Dick’s control over ­Nicole. The “full extension of normality” that is sentiment’s signature was not given by Scott to Z ­ elda as a working writer who wanted and needed his support. Scott indeed felt, as Dick Diver would finally say, that he had to save himself.16 ­Zelda herself could sound quite deft in her use of sentiment and sentimentality as nouns. She writes to Scott from Prangins after June 1930 that “I am sure there must be something to fill the next twenty years of a person who is willing to work for it, so do not feel you have any obligations toward me, sentimental or otherwise, unless you accept them as freely as you did when I was young and happy and quite different from how I am now” (Collected Writings 450). Later in 1930, in a prodigious feat of recall, Z ­ elda writes a stream-­of-­consciousness account of their married life from 1920–30, replete with names, places, and activities of all description, both pub­lic and private (451–56). She accuses Scott in his crush on Lois Moran in California: “you yourself engaged in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child,” then later believes that Scott was “thoroughly entangled sentimentally” with Lois in New York City. Such is also their shorthand language when discussing Scott’s overtures to Shirley Temple to be in his film treatment of “Babylon Revisited” in 1940, when Scott writes Z ­ elda that Temple’s last film vehicle, Young People, “is rather nauseous in its sentimentality” (Temple 322). Near the conclusion of her 1930 remembrance, Z ­ elda writes, “I have just begun to realize that sex and sentiment have little to do with each other. When I came to you twice last winter and asked you to start over it was because I thought I was becoming seriously involved sentimentally and preparing situations for which I was morally and practicly unfitted” (456). ­Zelda appears to conflate her lesbian flirtations with her dance teacher Egorowa with Scott’s fascination with “the girl” whom Lois Moran represented. In ­Zelda’s religious fervor later in the 1930s, she wrote Scott, “since Eden, man has been endowed with a double sexual impulse.

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Complete sexual fulfillment between man and wife is homosexuality. It is God’s word that this is so.” She wrote, “God’s promise to man is sexual fulfillment . . . that is sucking the genital organs of your mate.” ­Zelda believed these “beautiful and honourable” practices could keep couples from turning gay—which she knew God punished (Cline 357). No published material from her letters exists to support the idea that ­Zelda was traumatized by the incest material in Tender Is the Night.17 After the novel’s April 12, 1934, publication, ­Zelda objectively writes to Scott about its potential as a film: “My advice is to revert to the money-­triangle as you can’t possibly use the incest” (­Zelda, Collected Writings 473). There’s no resentment in her remarks about possibly being crushed by his creation of a ­Nicole Diver abused by her father. How cool ­Zelda sounds here—as ­Nicole—“up in her head now,” finally “collating the sentimentalities” (Tender 155) about sex and romance. ­Zelda briefly matches Scott’s use of the sentimental. However, it’s Scott who needed to be the androgynous hysteric in Tender. This was his most tenuous position of power, the chaotic deep structure behind his attempts to keep Z ­ elda from using “his” material and one which lies beneath the protestation, “I am the professional writer.” Such vertiginous shifts finally provided Fitzgerald with his heroine and hero. By installing Dick Diver in narrative domination as ­Nicole’s husband and psychiatrist, Scott attains in fiction the co-­doctoring status he sought from Z ­ elda’s analysts. To that end, “Better Ophelia and her flowers,” for as Fitzgerald finally has Dick Diver declare in righteous anger: “I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself ” (300).

Conclusion In a sense, institutionalized ­Zelda became a living dead sister who was a rival to Scott’s work—specifically the work in Tender, which consistently conjured up and cared for those selfsame sisters. Žižek notes that the Lacanian “objet petit a is not what we desire, what we are after but rather that which sets our desire in motion”; in Scott’s case, it is perhaps a mother or sisters’ love through “the formal frame which confers consistency on our desire.” Thus loving and saving ­Nicole in lieu of saving the sisters allows Scott to shift Dick Diver’s “desire . . . from one aspect to another” and retain a formal consistency, “a set of phantasmic features,” which “when encountered in a positive object, makes us desire this object” in “a pre-­given fantasy place” (POF 39). Jameson expressed for a criti­cal generation the maxim that “content through its own inner logic generates those categories in terms of which it organizes itself in a formal structure” (Marxism and Form 335). What is generated in Tender Is the Night are two versions not coextensive with its two published versions but rather the origi­nal Book One (1–112) that creates the full

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range of Dick Diver’s sentiment and seduction, and then the tale of ­Nicole’s violation in Book Two that borrows from Z ­ elda’s madness. Book One imagines maternal Dick Diver while Book Two imagines lover and husband Dick Diver. The gap traversed in fantasy is also between the two dead (chaste) sisters and ­Nicole, who will sexually implicate Dick in the patriarchy’s crimes. These two narratives must be read together as they refract off one another and allow completion of the novel, even as the two sisters and the ­Nicole/­Zelda narratives circulate toward an artistic whole that would determine whether Tender is deemed a success and a significant Fitzgerald work. I hold that Tender Is the Night is the psychological and sentimental key to all his fiction and the most intimate statement of which he was capable. The “traumatic core” is comprised of two stories and they both are framed by incest—brother/sister in benign rescue tinged with seduction and father/daughter seduction, which is never not vicious. That is the logic of Fitzgerald’s formal evolution of the Tender narrative to match his deep content: Sisters + Z ­ elda = Rosemary + ­Nicole. For Fitzgerald and Dick Diver, charm and “carrying the egos” dictate the fantasies which circulate sentimentally in the gap that limns Fitzgerald’s imperatives: the two sisters, their deaths, maternal “saving,” ­Zelda’s illness, and his unfinished novel. He will only be as complete as Tender Is the Night is complete and (must be) completed.

6 The Uncanny in Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Imagination

Cubism, Surrealism, and the Uncanny The surrealists delightedly worked against sentiment as something belonging to the middle class and its entertainments. Conversely as a writer attuned to audience and the popu­lar arts, Scott Fitzgerald was somewhat at odds with himself in working through surreal imagery as a sentimentalist. Committed to creating intensely relational bonds among his characters, he could not forego the sentimental or the romantic while he still proudly desired to be linked to modernist experiment. Fitzgerald is always labeled a romantic owing to affinities with Keats and others, but he also touched on so many of the currents of fiction in the early twentieth century, in­clud­ing realism, naturalism, romantic coming of age, and comedy of manners (Curnutt, Cambridge 97). Fitzgerald’s modernist affinities included stream of consciousness, poetic dissociation, and naturalism’s sober determinisms cut by irony; he stored away all those irregular pieces to fit. His style and achievement were varied and associative, as he attempted to integrate conventions from so many fictional impulses in Tender Is the Night. The novel Tender Is the Night becomes the clash in modernism of more traditional precepts of beauty and representation within romance and sentiment with the abstraction of beauty into form, romance into satire, and sentiment into a comedy of manners. Fitzgerald “wanted to fit it all in” through Dick Diver’s “wanting to be kind and good” that would deem him sentimental caretaker within a clinical framework. The substitutions and transferences in Tender Is the Night and Save Me the Waltz of bodies and roles may be partially explained through the ways that both

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Scott and ­Zelda Fitzgerald were influenced by cubism and surrealism. This influence is visible in the depiction of uncanny moments in their realistic fiction, especially in the refractions of light and an anagrammar of rearrangements in perspective. The Fitzgeralds, while absorbing much of early twentieth-century painting’s energy and experimentation, cannot be truly defined as fellow travelers of the cubists or surrealists, not the least because no movement in modern art can truly limn achievements in the different medium of prose fiction. However, aspects of cubist influence extended to different literary movements in the early twentieth century, in­clud­ing imagists, futurists, and concrete poets. Wendy Steiner writes, “The size and position of objects are not dependent upon their distance from the viewer but upon their conceptual or formal importance.” Objects are broken up and reassembled according to a conceptual logic (Colors 179, 181). Such a statement is key to a fundamental difference between the parallax and refraction driving sentiment and the presentation of cubism. Sentiment depends on multiple points of view in an intimate transaction, while cubism is a statement of equilibration envisioned at a distance rather than from difference or gap. Here, for example, is what Fitzgerald has Dick Diver accomplish with Francisco by segmenting him through charm and then reassembling his sentimental logic. Such extrapolation from feeling is Hume’s starting point for any state of sympathy, rather than a judgment based on reason.1 Fitzgerald then with a predilection for beauty and never stinting on the description of his women could experiment through a partial abstracting of them into form. Who is Dick Diver’s ubiquitous “girl” in Tender Is the Night if not a chaste fig­ure for his sentimentalism, a precipitate of a muse distilled into whatever young woman is at hand, as he manifests a constant need to see “her” in pub­lic and know she’s there? Hal Foster speaks of Andre Breton’s move with his Nadja in Nadja (1928) from surrogate to surrogate, as the very metonymic motion of Breton’s desire, in an instinct for mastery over traumatic loss. The uncanny surrealist quest for the lost object that is never found (for Scott, always the two lost Fitzgerald sisters) is obsessively replicated in Tender. Its emblems include the black lace drawers, the key to the silver closet, the Gold Star Mothers, grandfather’s whiskers, the girl who is “blooming,” and the filigreed bars at the clinic: all of these possess a similar status to that of the Eczema woman, herself a surreal object, who inquires bitterly, “I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was” (185). Fitzgerald was never capable of a Flaubertian clinical distance from his characters’ bodies or emotions or a broken syntactical line that might have shaded his work toward a literary cubism or surrealism. Cubism was most likely for him a more abstract triumph of form while surrealism was an emotional welding together of disparate forms and most of­ ten plying (playing to) its audience. Sentiment itself places the object under a

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continual refracted seduction and sympathy that engenders within the gap or bracketing a subject’s attitude or response. The energy then activated within the gap is the sentiment itself. Finally, neither cubism nor surrealism is sentimental, though surrealism will most of­ten work flamboyantly with sentiment against itself to show “identification” as a psychosexual juxtaposition of visuals. Scott Fitzgerald will borrow from both cubism and surrealism to portray the riddles of sentiment within his fiction.2 Scott Fitzgerald constructed extended emotional conceits that comprise an angle of vision to sustain and associate many of Tender’s surfaces for the reader. Planes of intent intersect in a depthless present in which Francisco, Dum­phry, and D. Warren, for example, pass Dick on from sentimental identification to sentimental repulsion and then into the presence of the dying incestuous father within a single “setting” (245–48). Along with this essentially cubist “crossing” of integrated planes, Fitzgerald also was fascinated by the popu­lar culture collaging and machinist modernisms that surrealism combined in so many sensational works beginning in the 1920s. His sleek ars decoratif descriptions of rooms and bodies in Tender as well as his brilliant extended conceit of ­Nicole Warren Diver’s body give testament to his surrealistic affinities that define an erotics of modern consumption and production. His use of the uncanny similitudes in many of the novel’s doublings lead to a haunting of shapes and forms in Dick Diver’s sentimental consciousness. The tension in surrealism is always present in the collage principle where disparate materials or emotional states strain against one another. The dazzling conceit of ­Nicole as Ameri­can continent, producer, consumer, and national source of desire and commodity hunger (Tender 55) makes ­Nicole’s body co-­extensive with America itself. This conceit is the very fulcrum of the realism that ­Rosemary will represent in Daddy’s Girl, another deflected collage of cultural detritus from the dregs of misplaced sentiment. Fitzgerald encapsulates his major thematic statements with ­Nicole as a surrealist imago of West­ern desire and commodification in the erotics of materialism that sentiment regulates and which the uncanny distributes to disparate sites.3 Yet Fitzgerald is not as antic as were the surrealists or as dismissive of traditional genres. He is not trying to blow up realism and romance but to flamboyantly enhance their interaction. Foster comments that “surrealism oscillates between [the] two uncanny fantasies of maternal plenitude and paternal punishment” (25). This oscillation is expressed most powerfully in Tender through Dick’s affiliation with the Gold Star Mothers as well as the censoring of his intimation of charm’s power by the return of Devereux Warren: these two identifications speak to what Dick most powerfully believes and is “condemned to carry.” The intense moments of Dick’s recognition of self and role are regulated by surreal and uncanny moments such as

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the scene where Dick holds the key to his mother’s silver closet or when Dum­ phry returns to herald the degenerate father. These scenes allow Fitzgerald to work through Dick’s intense conceptualizations of his sentimental nature. Freud understood that a special authority takes shape within the ego “which is able to confront the rest of the ego” and “performs the function of self-­observation and self-­criticism.” This too is a doubling and a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development that we come back to again and again at the same spot (“The Uncanny” 142–44). Fitzgerald splits off Dick as a double to Francisco in his presence and constructs his own reverie on what is best about his “carrying” of the egos, a creation of what certainly could be called his conscience. Dick, Jules Peterson, and Devereux Warren are literally “on the bed,” while ­Rosemary replaces ­Nicole on the bed and ­Nicole replaces Francisco (245) at the hotel, sitting with Dick in the bar-­restaurant (252). ­Nicole’s exclamation of “It’s you!” (Tender 112) could also be the phrase uttered by Dick at the return of Dum­phry and Warren. Fitzgerald perceives the sentimental manifestation of charm and its implications in gender and patriarchy activated in uncanny conjunction with Dick Diver’s best self and deepest fears. To complete Tender Is the Night and give full voice to the maternal and paternal fantasies that underwrite his sentimental imagination, Scott Fitzgerald ultimately integrated the collision of two powerful imaginaries—“saving the two (dead) sisters” and “controlling the writing and treatment of ­Zelda Sayre ­Fitzgerald”—in a narrative palimpsest. The immediate needs of his wife set against his own need to finish the novel were no less powerful than the primal scene he was consistently repeating in the fiction through the doubling and caring for young girls and women. The uncanny for Freud always involved the return of a familiar phenomenon, be it image, object, person, or event that was “made strange” by repression (Foster 7). Freud in “The Uncanny” spends pages meticulously combing dictionary definitions for the uncanny in several languages to articulate the shadow line between heimlich and unheimlich (125–34). Part of his analy­sis centers on the relation of heimlich’s “familiar and comfortable” in relation to unheimlich’s “concealed and hidden” (132). Heimlich may refer to sentiment in its homely domesticity and security while unheimlich becomes the very synonym for “uncanny.” We may hypothesize as well that the uncanny is the sentimental lacking an object relation of familiar nature, that there exists a current or continuum between the two from estrangement to security that occurs in the parallax gap of the subject or reader. As this drama might work itself out in Scott Fitzgerald and his fiction, the need to save and control the images of the two sisters was concomitant with the need to retain psychic and artistic space of his own: their control and paradoxically remaining safely dead would, once more, save his ego as a writer. In a double sentimental parable, Tender Is the Night could also “save” Z ­ elda by

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“paying” for her treatment as well as romantically “saving” her on the page when ­Nicole is “saved.” Book sales and fictional praxis could somehow be reintegrated with a husband’s deep personal and writerly needs through sympathy, both real and imagined. In a darker vein, Tender could save Scott from ­Zelda. A perfect configuration arose for Scott in the fiction of Tender Is the Night: “the thing had drifted into [Dick’s] hands,” the wonder of possessing ­Nicole (Tender 139). At the same time Dr. Meyer attempted to herd Scott away from ­Zelda’s case at Phipps in 1932–33, Scott maneuvered Dick Diver into total control of ­Nicole’s case in the Tender manuscript. This rewriting of the facts from the Fitzgeralds’ life world would proliferate through­out the composition of Tender and contribute to repeated instances of the “uncanny” in the novel, where so many strands of repressed material would return. A fiction such as Tender Is the Night—with its multiple origins and narrative adjustments over the years of its imagining—finally depended upon many different correspondences and splicings for its total effect on the reader. Thus Tender is particularly vulnerable to associations with the uncanny, which is to a large degree fundamentally constituent of any reader’s ability to make connections at all between scenes and symbols as well as abstract and figurative language in a text.4 This reading process makes each experience and set of impressions in the text richly colored by the personality and projections of the psyche of this central character, leading to the inevitable “manifest and latent content” of Freud’s dream text. Fitzgerald’s powerful sentimental commitment is to romance and realism deeply inflected by the uncanny that would drive surrealism.5 His relation to the uncanny suggests what Poovey calls “the cluster of associated images that reappear or occupy strategic positions” and the ways in which they are “broken up and redistributed in the text.” Poovey labels the criti­cal method thus articulated as a “structural psychoanalytic methodology” (19), which I apply precisely to Tender’s obsessive condensation and repetition and to Fitzgerald’s narrative deflections in his crisis years of 1931–34. Tender necessarily thinks beyond its creator in relation to uncanny semblances and briefs; the novel works on the same sentimental materials from different vantage points and needs, of­ten doubling, frequently hidden.

The Cardinal’s Palace and Rosemary’s Horse Chestnut Tree Breton remarked in 1929 that surrealist collages are “slits in time . . . where former lives, actual lives, future lives melt together into one life”; he concluded that such an image “is dialectic at a standstill” (Foster 168, 180). Fitzgerald was a master at such uncanny conflations of time and space to limn an individual’s life within a his­tori­cally fluid context. Two of the most powerful scenes in Tender—

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the Gold Star Mothers and ­Nicole, ­Rosemary, and Dick at the Paris hotel (100– 01) and Dick’s interview with Francisco interrupted by Dum­phry and his news of Devereux Warren (245–46)—demonstrate his extraordinary ability to grasp far-­reaching his­tori­cal and personal curves of intimacy within a few lines. He in effect writes rhetorical collages in the collisions among past, present, and future in Dick’s life, which confirm and then inevitably overwhelm his high sentimental estimate of himself. These scenes also bring to the surface of the narrative all the different strands in a narrative cubism where all “planes” or “strands” of an experience can be grasped in one sustained image set. They are captured in a snapshot of sensibility in one surface, where the disruption of a unitary identity, be it of a place or a person, is given full value past the competing associations. A scene that enabled Scott to merge both actual history and architecture with the dynamic future occurs when Dick and Rosemary in Book One attend a party in Paris: “It was a house hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s palace in the Rue Monsieur, but once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that ­Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric like shock, a definite nervous experience, perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish” (71).6 ­Rosemary quickly has the “detached false-­and-­exalted feeling of being on a set”; “detached” is always an ominous herald in Tender that suggests serious uncanny dislocation, while “being on a set” locates Tender’s characters through­out the novel. Dick remembers feeling “detached” as he is about to assume ­Nicole’s “case” (139); Dum­phry “detaches” himself from the shrubbery to interrupt Dick’s sentimental epiphany (245); ­Nicole watches a “vivid scene detach itself ” as Maria Wallis shoots a man on a Paris railway platform (83); Tommy Barban reappears to disrupt the Divers’ lives, “detaching and identifying” himself on Golding’s yacht to ­Nicole’s “delight” (269). An aura radiates through the people at the Çardinal de Retz palace-­house. They “function” on this “set” as does “a human hand picking up jagged broken glass” (71) and “no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into something else, becoming everything a room was not,” as Fitzgerald attempts to uncannily hurl all sensation and its apprehension into a future “shock” that can be experienced but not truly apprehended in language. In Gertrude Stein’s writing, we must agree not to solve the text but be in it; “we must relinquish a position of mastery” and agree to wander, “submitting ourselves to language” (Berry 18), suggesting why Fitzgerald is almost a cubist and surrealist; he won’t defamiliarize the syntax of his prose as Stein did but rather he asks us to submit to its simultaneous impressions. To “read” oneself into the architecture of the futuristic setting is to be in its parallax structure on a “highly-­polished moving stairway” (71–72). Tender’s characters are the exhibits themselves within the seventeenth-­century palace as frame, a shell enclosing a future, and in Tender such structures proliferate

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as the physical outward appearance of things of­t en uncannily masks the reality of the thing or person. Foster speaks of the dialectical relations between the “recovered outmoded” and the “mechanical commodified,” which “echoes that between aura and shock in Baudelaire read by Benjamin” (127). The Cardinal’s hollowed out palace is industrialized into art deco apartments. The outer shell (recovered outmoded) encloses the new dwellings (mechanical commodified). The difference may be that Scott Fitzgerald (almost a surrealist) does not satirize them but uses the structures as modes of composition. He is still within their thrall with­ out coming to radical reflexive commentary on them; rather in true cubist shock, the human form is also (dis)placed in the setting, as ­Nicole is the racing chassis beneath the family limousine (Tender 280), and the crusted eczema encases the woman artist (183–85). Furthermore, the lesbian women at the Paris party are described in much the same aesthetic that surrealism would re-­make and unmake the female body as mannequin: “there was a trio of young women sitting on the bench. They were all tall and slender with small heads groomed like mannequins, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-­stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods” (72)—or rather like ­Nicole’s ominous filigreed sanitarium bars (183). The “mannequins” pronounce Dick “charming,” that he “gives a good show,” but that he is tedious; the Divers drink too much and have no “corrugated” surfaces (72–3). ­Rosemary sees the Divers from outside as outsiders (a further refracted line of sight) before she is accosted as an object of desire by one of the women in “a starched blue shirt with the bright blue eyes and the red cheeks and the very gray suit, a poster of a girl” (73), perhaps a patriotic Ameri­can flag girl doll of lesbian issue. Fitzgerald designs the apartment within a relentless economy of sight. Rosemary, Dick, and the three cobra women all visualize: the verbs within one paragraph yield “saw,” “see,” “looked about,” “fixed . . . glances,” and “eyes groped for” (73). Within the tableau of the apartment, the actors on the “set” are finally expelled “to the sudden past of the moving stone façade [of the Palace] without” (72–74), itself a surrealist oxymoronic reversal: a sudden past, a moving facade.7 ­Rosemary and Dick are not in a hall looking at the “Decorative Arts Exhibition” (71); they are on exhibit and within “the apartment’s novel organization of light values,” a statement enclosing two puns: novel as both “new” and Tender Is the Night itself and “light values” as both painterly illumination and perhaps scant value at all, “becoming everything a room was not” (72). Fitzgerald brings the installation to life for the reader by creating an environment of its uncanny contours. Rosemary herself instinctively and naively grasps her own phallic image in the new era of Hollywood’s visual pleasure as she intensely identifies with the horse chestnut tree strapped into the truck in the Paris dawn. The uncanny is cast in a sense of wonder. Rosemary and the “strapped” horse chestnut tree exemplify what

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Foster calls surrealism’s signature shocks to the audience, the “veiled erotic” and the “fixed explosive,” which he sums up as the “vulgar image of feminine sexuality common in surrealism” (25). Foster cites a Foucault essay on Magritte in which he speaks of the “affirmation and resemblance (or similitude)” as “the privileged terms of traditional representation” in the “iconic resemblance of the image to it” (96). Rosemary herself relaxes into her own sexualized presentation in her impression of resemblance atop the load in the phallic carrot wagon.8 In the realm of the textual uncanny, a phallus in Tender Is the Night disappears on a beach in black lace drawers (21) and reappears as a tree bound for Paris boulevards (79). ­Rosemary’s “hilarity” may be in her uncanny intuition about the found object of the horse chestnut tree: she can place herself in collage-­relation to it. ­Rosemary herself is the female spectator, also in the camera’s gaze, on the screen, and enjoys the view, herself a cubist flattening of surfaces into one responding portrait.9 Her happiness is rhetorically similar to ­Nicole’s in an alternate Diver Manuscript ending during Dick’s drunken leave-­taking above the beach: “she [­Nicole] became really happy and everything turned inside out disclosing such a new lining that it seemed as if her future life would have such a logical background as never was” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 613). This syntax is contorted in Stein­ian negation (rare for Fitzgerald), itself turned “inside out. Such transferences are most always accompanied by incest fantasies, as the imagined fig­ure might metaphorically become his own sister having incestuous intercourse. If the double takes the form of hermaphrodite or twin, the deep structure of Fitzgerald becoming his two sisters in narrative guises may be partially explained (see Chapter 2). “The thing fell into his hands” is repeated again and again in “a new lining”: ­Nicole’s case, the body, the sheets, the cover up, the key, the rosary, and the horse chestnut tree. Sentiment is directed sympathy, either voluntary or involuntary. The uncanny is experienced involuntarily; it’s initially estranging and out of our control. The moments of high sentimental feeling may be enhanced or arrested by the ways in which the uncanny turns us toward such a synchronized moment—an epiphany such as the Gold Star Mothers or Francisco—or away from sentimental identification, such as Dum­phry’s sudden reappearance. In either case, the uncanny facilitates what is an intensely subjective sentimental moment. High sentiment involuntarily brings forth strong emotions and tears. In the cases of both sentiment and the uncanny, we are affected by them. Sentimentality of­ten masks the uncanny, leaving us emotionally drenched rather than eerily within the sublime. Our reader’s transference can be analogized to our reader’s sympathy, itself uncannily and sentimentally enlisted about characters and scenes which have never existed but who call up other characters and scenes from our lives and thus stimulate our shock of recognition. The uncanny is constituent of a reader’s ability to

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make connections between scenes and symbols and within both abstract and figurative language. What does our criti­cal era’s omnipresent “always already” mean if not the imaginary temporality of an uncannily arranged sentence whose completed condition is always in some way “like another one” that allows us to feel and understand anything at all? The arc is always between the cold apprehension of the uncanny and its conversion to sentimental response as the reader reworks the power of the uncanny into “like” and “same” identification with the “other one”: “I know just how you feel,” “It’s uncanny how you understand me,” “ I know what you’re thinking without your saying it.”10

(Paper) Dolls Rosemary’s representation and response in Tender is part of a cluster of associations in which dolls are referenced in a working through of meanings that include ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s paper dolls, Scott’s view of popu­lar cultural girl icons, and his perhaps subconscious need to denigrate both within a repetitive imaginary of doll poses, doll body parts, and voices. The most prominent early image of a doll in the novel may be that of Dick in his bathing costume. It is as if ­Nicole were a deadpan sexologist as wardrobe mistress on a movie set as he dutifully appears costumed for the “take.” ­Zelda had begun her work with paper dolls in 1927 at their rented estate at Ellerslie in Delaware. Her passionate interest enabled her to create a gallery of fig­ures, which included ornate families of bears and wolves, repeatedly dressed in brightly colored skivvies that could also be taken for bathing trunks. ­Zelda also created cardboard fig­ures of renaissance courtiers as high-­heeled, bare-­ chested musclemen in garish tights, Little Red Riding Hoods in party dresses, as well as an entire wardrobe for paper dolls representing Scott, Scottie, and herself. These miniatures remain ­Zelda’s most singular creations, witty, sardonic, and gorgeous. She had studied the forms in French illustrated his­tori­cal art (Cline 206), paying great attention to her fig­ures’ ambiguous gender; the dolls are more carnivalesque siblings to her grotesquely muscled female ballet dancers.11 ­Zelda’s representational art in her paper dolls did not anger Scott to the degree of her ballet, which he saw to be a harmful physical obsession, or her writing, which was seen as a professional and emotional threat. Yet in his competitive watchfulness over his own writing, he could not resist comment on the status of paper doll art through his range of allusions in Tender. On her buying spree, ­Nicole purchases “miniatures for a doll’s house and also “prawn”-­colored cloth (54), perhaps flesh-­colored for lining Dick’s black lace garment. ­Rosemary herself matches Dick as a doll fig­ure when the audience screening her movie sees her as “the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out stiffly like the solid hair of a tanagra fig­ure . . . embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting

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a new paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind” (68–69). Within this symbolic economy of dolls, Scott and Z ­ elda may be linked to one of surrealism’s most bizarre artists, Hans Bellmer, whose photographs of segmented dolls in the 1930s arranged in violent and sexualized poses make his work a suggestive lens through which to see the Fitzgeralds involved in deploying an image and an aesthetic. Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious (1993) reproduces the photo of a 1936 Bellmer poupee (173) that is disturbingly redolent of ­Rosemary’s multiple roles (Hollywood’s and her own). Bellmer poses conjoined female legs and hips with Mary Janes and socks at either end, which straddle a tree that forks off into arms that “crucify” the legs. The rough tree bark splits the tree up through where the head would be “attached.” In the realm of transgendered sexual fantasy, the legs are strapped on or molded to the tree rather than the phallic tree attached to Rosemary. Fitzgerald “cuts” Rosemary to the lineaments of a cardboard paper doll (Tender 69). On the occasion of the ride atop the carrot wagon, Rosemary shares her perch with “a manufacturer of doll’s voices from Newark” (79). Rosemary in Krauss’s terms would be a “new assembly,” “dismantled and reassembled” according to the author’s needs (172). Dick Diver himself in Zurich as a student feels like “a toy maker” with “infinite precision . . . infinite patience” (118) and is dismayed at his later image of mad ­Nicole “suspended from him,” where they were no longer “apposite and complementary” but much like a segmented fig­ure of the puppeteer-­dollmaker and his jointed doll, a lifeworld “Dicole” (190). This scene comes immediately after the Divers are analogized to the fig­ures in the Punch and Judy show outside Zurich, where Switzerland as “Alpine land[s]” had been pointedly introduced as the “home of the toy and the funicular” (118). As Dick draws away from ­Nicole he sees “the girl” everywhere. He drunkenly flirts with a generic blonde English girl in Rome; distracted and reeling, he flails and “a row of [Y] [L]enci dolls on the cigar counter fell suddenly to the floor” (223). The Lenci Dolls were popu­ lar high-­end dolls of washable cloth and lightweight molds created by an Italian, Madame Lenci, beginning in 1919. They were mass-­marketed in Europe and issued in models that included a femme fatale, a “little gentleman,” a cowboy, and a Pierrot doll; to sweep a row of them to the floor is to suggest their interchangeable quality. Knocking a row of dolls over is akin to drunken Dick’s repeatedly losing his balance, literally and figuratively, as the novel winds down. Fitzgerald punctuates the doll imagery when Dick and ­Nicole are emotionally spent in the Lausanne hotel bar, mechanically listening to a phonograph’s playing “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” (252). When Dick has lost all “balance” with people and can’t “carry” anyone while aquaplaning, he exclaims, “I couldn’t have lifted a paper doll that time,” to which “­Nicole was annoyed—everything he did annoyed her now” (285). Finally, in a violent uncanny mix of psychiatry, sentiment, and

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doll-­making, Dick says goodbye to his children: “he wanted to lift their beautiful heads off their shoulders and hold them close for hours” (311). When Tommy first makes love to ­Nicole, he “inspect[s] the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head” (295), as if he were the quality control worker at the doll factory. Scott’s pattern in articulating the doll/paper doll image is always repeated in some form of denigration: castration, a cheapened (cardboard) quality, manufactured voices, recorded dirges, physical weakness, and potential violence. His conceptions belie ­Zelda’s dolls that have a rich and varied color sense, gendered wit in conception, and a formal elegance. Thus even with the one minor art he actually did not oppose for ­Zelda, he couldn’t help but overwrite it with his own interpretation.12 ­Nicole also gets to “manufacture” the dolls’ voices when she suggests to Dick that he dance with some girls at a Swiss ski lodge. As Dick instinctively tries to deflect her by asking what he would say to them, ­Nicole’s “low almost harsh voice rose a few notes, simulating a plaintive coquetry: ‘Say: Ickle durl, oo is de pwettiest sing.’” Dick quickly declines, sensing an instability and accusation in her brittle act: “I don’t like ickle durls . . . I feel as if I’m pushing a baby carriage,” but he knows “it was a dangerous subject” and he continued “to stare far over the heads of young maidens” (172). ­Nicole has scripted his doll’s voice, given him his seduction lines through a mock-­child’s vernacular. The scene plays as derisively as Fitzgerald relating the narrating of Rosemary’s movie screening in a baby’s voice (“Daddy’s girl. . . . OOO-­OOO-­tweet, de tweetest thing” (69)—Hollywood’s dialogue infantilizes. ­Nicole herself is always already the painted doll with “porcelain cheeks” (156), a traditional nostalgic image but one adumbrated by so many mechanized and Hollywood tricks.13 She controls the image on the beach with the tableau vivant shock of Dick as “bathing doll.” ­Zelda’s witty and delightful paper doll courtiers are glossed by Scott’s “pansy’s trick” that he ascribes to the inscrutable ­Nicole. In the grouping of ­Zelda’s dolls that Lanahan calls “Courtiers” (38–39), all six of the fig­ures whose groin areas are outlined appear to be without male genitalia. Of course, these were paper dolls for her daughter Scottie and were also subject to the conventions of the form, but in light of how Scott will have ­Nicole dress Dick (emasculating, transgendered) on the beach, they are at the least suggestive. ­Zelda’s paper dolls that depict Scott through 1932 have his perfect facial likeness on his compact body. One sprightly doll shows him in beige skivvies and undershirt top with bright green socks and spats. Another page entitled “Scott’s costumes” in Lanahan’s reproductions features a (headless) elegant beige suit faced by a curious headless fig­ure with huge wings, wearing a dress shirt and tie, perhaps the ensemble worn with the suit and a walking skirt, carrying a small cane in the right hand in which is also held a smoke-­curling cigarette and a glove. The caption by Lanahan is from

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Save Me the Waltz describing Ala­bama’s husband David Knight: “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention” (Waltz 37). The effect is something like Mary Poppins crossed with a Brooks Brothers model. Scott’s most extended image of Dick Diver as a doll-­like fig­ure is in a masculinized vein in which he comes to meet Rosemary at the “Films Par Excellence” Studio in Paris. Dick is sick with desire: “dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories, he was yet swayed and driven as an animal. . . . He went briskly around the block with the fatuousness of one of Tarkington’s adolescents, hurrying at the blind places lest he miss Rosemary’s coming out of the studio.”14 He passes neighborhood stores that advertise “1000 chemises,” pawn shops, pastry shops, clerical apparel (“Vetements Ecclesiastiques”), and funeral parlors. The myriad number of shirts recall Gatsby’s treasure unfolded for Daisy at his mansion, the clerical garb that Dick’s father wore (and Dick also symbolically wears) in the role of ministering to parishioners-­patients. Dick moves like a mannequin or automaton, a favorite surrealist image: “he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt-­sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar molded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut exactly, his hand holding his small briefcase like a dandy” (91). He is “taking direction” from Fitzgerald—walk there, stand there, hold the briefcase—making the scene an admixture of stasis and movement. He is among commodities and one himself, something of a machine with a sleeve valve and “plastically” molded collar.15 In 1929, Breton and Aragon in Variétés juxtaposed a “mannequin-­man of fashion in the Paris streets” and “two sandwich men at a Leipzig fair” with masks from a Congolese priest and another from Greek tragedy (Foster 137). The surrealist “commentary” behind this grouping included everything that Scott puts into Dick Diver as “mannequin-­man,” in­clud­ing the references to fashion, religion, commodity, and an “animalistic desire,” which ends with references to St. Francis (Scott Fitzgerald) doing penance in his uniform, that of “sackcloth and ashes” (Tender 91). Walter Benjamin might further explain Dick with his vision of the urban flaneur referenced in his final form as a “sandwich board man,” where the human becomes commodity” and “takes the concept of being for sale itself for a walk” (Foster 271). Dick hurrying to ­Rosemary walks past advertisements that scream “Solde” and “Reclame” and define him. In the case of Dick at Rosemary’s studio, he is the desiring dandy “doll” falling apart behind his clothes, as events will soon attest. Finally, Fitzgerald’s firm appraisal of ­Nicole and Dick as she comes free of him is that such intimacy or merging is impossible “simply because no one nature can extend inside another” (Tender 280). Certainly no one writing nature can exist in this fashion for Scott as he strove to retain his masculine writer’s subjectivity in the face of Z ­ elda’s creative onslaught.

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No “nesting” dolls for the Divers or the Fitzgeralds in Scott’s rejoinder to sentiment on behalf of his rights to authorship.

“You Can Come Back If You Want To Play Anagrams” Anagrams are transpositions of letters in a name or in a phrase to form a new word. Cubism itself as practiced by Braque and Picasso shifted and realigned perspective in more abstract shapes while surrealism combined disparate images in juxtaposition. As we have seen in Tender, bodies and their rearrangement and reassignment, either physically or symbolically, are familiar recombinant entities. Hans Bellmer embraced the metaphor of the “anagram” in the mid-­1930s to describe his segmented female dolls, which had their limbs and torsos cruelly rearranged into poses of violence and degradation. He wrote, “the anagram is the key to all my work. The body is like a sentence that invites us to re-­arrange it”; he commented that his sec­ond doll was “a series of endless anagrams” (Foster 103 quoting Webb, The Erotic Arts 370).16 Almost three-­dozen “two sisters” references can be deduced or referenced in Tender and rearranged each time in a different semantics according to plot necessity and repetition compulsion. They are images of Fitzgerald’s ubiquitous girl whom Dick Diver takes and/or sees everywhere. Lich­tenstein comments that Bellmer’s dolls were influenced by the overwhelming, mechanized, spectacularized, and feminized popu­lar culture of the 1920s (13); this is similar to a Fitzgerald whose two sisters’ images and the “harlot’s mind” of Hollywood are united, displayed and rearranged through the disassembled ­Nicole and Rosemary and the uncanny substitution of psychosexual bodies in the novel. To suggest how Fitzgerald worked through an anagrammatic structure, consider the extended scene that immediately follows the citation of anagrams. In the hotel in Paris near the climax of Book One, a drunken and addled Abe North is consistently implicating the Divers and Rosemary in an on-­going comic saga of misrecognition and enmity among Afro-­Europeans with whom he has become embroiled. Dick and Rosemary half-­listen to him and wish to be alone. Abe sulks and comments, “I bet if ­Nicole was here she’d let me come back,” whereupon Dick says, “You can come back if you want to play anagrams” (108). Shortly thereafter, Rosemary is alone in her room, musing about finishing a note to her mother (arrangements of letters and words) when “rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she was not alone in the room.” Fitzgerald then describes the optics of refracting objects in a key statement for his narrative aesthetics (see the opening to Chapter 4) and ends violently with references to Tender’s arrangements of male racialized and gendered bodies (Tender 109). Fitzgerald anticipates Rosemary’s uncanny response with a disquisition on refraction and surfaces

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and the perceptions of light that mark the “totality of the refraction,” composed of visual response as well as those images lodged in the subconscious.17 Similar to the manner in which Fitzgerald uncannily attributed his calling as a writer to the death of his two sisters, Rosemary “mystically” realizes Peterson’s dead body before she sees it. The fact that Rosemary senses the body prior to visualization is Fitzgerald’s commitment to the melodrama, of what Lauren Berlant calls “the sentimental mise-­en-­scene” in which “all texts are docudramas, their realism intensified into a kind of soft surrealism that constitutes a command and a demand for the real to show up and be adequate to fantasy” (17); in this case, the multiple refractions of a white starlet’s body, a black male body, and Abraham (Lincoln) North tell an anagrammatic truth about the sublimations of ­Nicole’s rape and its meanings, yielding a sentimental causality in which associations become reflections. Rosemary’s “turning” may be further explained by Jameson’s reference to “those peculiar mental experiences Lyotard terms paralogisms” which are “perceptual paradoxes that we cannot think or unravel by way of conscious abstractions and which bring us up short against the visual occasions” (Postmodernism 157). The refracted objects are like cracked lenses with distorted vision, each surface yielding another angle of vision, myriad and mute recorders of shapes. ­Rosemary is Peterson’s (obverse) double, the darkest male as she is the whitest female. The work of uniting them involves reflections in “lights” and “shadows.” After the dead weight of Peterson’s body, the “film” suddenly begins to “move” when ­Rosemary summons Dick, the exchange of coverlets, the rearrangement of the body, and ­Nicole’s frantic moments in the bathroom. At the conclusion of Book One, the structure of Tender is laid bare beyond the audience’s ability to assimilate its full meaning. What they know is death, black blood, the exchange of coverlets, and madness. With the murdered Jules Peterson, ­Nicole’s rape is reinvoked through the death of a black man in the Hollywood heroine’s bed, where he can never be on-­screen while the white heroine’s sexual purity remains intact. Every transgression of every daughter’s body in the novel is uncannily recreated in ­Rosemary’s “turning” and “sight lines.” These fierce surreal substitutions of blood and sex, black and white, and male and female uncannily displace both race and gender.18 At this moment, ­Zelda’s ballet obsession is Scott’s uncanny writerly choice for ­Rosemary’s physical “turning,” one which discloses death. Ballet itself may be the quintessential bodily anagrammar with its stretches and leaps from moment-­to-­ moment, a rearrangement of the human body into new contortions and beautiful poses, casting its artist-­athletes in arrested myth and motion through agonizing physical labor that nonetheless is cast as a weightlessness that defies bodily physics.19 Within surrealism, the intense activity of the swirling dancer is most famously arrested in photographic shock by Man Ray (Foster 18). Aesthetically,

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Tender’s scene with ­Rosemary’s ballet turn describes the effects and resources of perspective and light that a painter would use, as another of Z ­ elda’s arts is referenced. The most discussed surrealistic line in Z ­ elda’s Waltz is that of Ala­bama’s fantasy of “crawling into the friendly cave of [David’s] ear.” This is prefaced by David distorted as in a mirror vision of her own eyes: “she felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic” (Waltz 40). The elements of refraction that ­Zelda employs are akin to Scott’s emphasizing Rosemary’s ballet turn to find the “dead Negro” where, in a final uncanny substitution, “she had the preposterous idea that it was Abe North” (109).20 Abe had “eyed the contents of the [anagram] box with physical revulsion” (108). He cannot negotiate black and white issues among races and classes, and he signifies an animus against anyone who is “planning to mix wit de quality” (20). “Rearrangement” is aberrant or mongrelizing to Abe. “Lincoln” rearranged the racial face of America in its rights and privileges in 1863 by emancipating the slaves but he did not live to play “racial” anagrams, leaving a legacy of unsolved racial problems and enmities. When the lesbian girl comes on to Rosemary at the party, “with distaste, Rosemary saw her plain” (73), prefacing Rosemary’s “distaste” for minstrelized Peterson, “his insincere eyes that . . . rolled white semi­ circles of panic . . . all this was as remote from her as sickness (107, emphasis mine). Abe North has brought Peterson to the Divers’ suite, where Rosemary is “rather revolted” at Abe’s “dirty hands” as he drunkenly slurs compliments at her (107). For Rosemary to make the equation of Peterson and Abe North is to racialize them in an anagrammatic relation in which Peterson in a reversal of April 1865 somehow dies for the sins of Abe North (who is “revulsed” by “mixing,” who mongrelizes letters and classes) in his meddling in black affairs. Finally, this uncanny rearranging of bodies takes place precisely upon the bed on which Dick had sat with Rosemary and jumped from, leaving wrinkles when ­Nicole has come upon them unawares (105). In a mystical way, Dick prefaces Devereux Warren, the father getting up off his bed and “walking” (251). Dick thus has already been rearranged as a sentence, as an anagram of a “dead black man in a starlet’s bed” who will become an “incestuous father walking off a death bed.” These are the replacement dolls for Dick Diver in Tender’s (ana)grammar. Anagrams are to words and sentences what surfaces and planes are to cubist perspective. In a literary vein, they bring disparate scenes to the foreground all at once in a reader’s imagining. The shock of recognition on Rosemary’s part is that she wants to make a substitution of Abe. Dick Diver fails to understand his sentimental duties for ­Nicole, even with his ability to “dissect into pieces” and rearrange the anagrams. In ef-

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fect, the game of anagrams is always the analyst’s and author’s tale, drawing out and demystifying the uncanny, rearranging the pieces into a sentimental narrative the patient can stand and the reader can understand. Rosemary’s discovery of Peterson’s body may be uncannily ­anagrammatically connected with Dick’s childhood memory of secreting the key to the silver closet. Fitzgerald is always committed to what happens next? unlike, for example, Gertrude Stein. He never wishes to exhaust realism and push against syntax but to enhance its vividness. In the realm of the linguistically uncanny, Fitzgerald and Stein share a congruence. The opening sentence of the Tender quote (109)—“In an inhabited room there are refracting objects”—cites the titles (Objects, Rooms) of two of Stein’s three sections in Tender Buttons (1914), generally agreed to be her text most indebted to cubism. However, Fitzgerald’s “objects” and “rooms” are always exactly full of beauty and relation; the glass fitter fitting the pieces is the sentimental goal.21 Rosemary has her uncanny moment, and Tender’s plot diachronically drives forward again through the constellation of images. “The totality of this refraction” is the perceptual world that makes up the sentimental real for Fitzgerald. He never wishes us to lose our way in a hypertext; rather he wants us to deal intimately with its arranged materials and make them less arbitrary as language. Fitzgerald is playing anagrams through Dick’s intimation with his mother’s silver keys that “the thing had drifted into his hands” (139); such is the root meaning of a visual for the spectator-­reader in the sleight-­of-­hand that comprises anagrammar.

Enchaining the Uncanny: Rosemary’s Bed and Fatty Arbuckle Rosemary experiences dread through the uncanny sensation of Peterson’s body inhabiting her room before she is truly aware of it. However, Fitzgerald was not finished enchaining the references. Dick worries about Rosemary’s reputation in Hollywood if the incident is exposed, for “the paint was scarcely dry on the Arbuckle case” (110). Tellingly, Dick himself later muses that the Warrens were going “to buy her a nice young doctor, the paint scarcely dry on him” (153). Why would Fitzgerald use the same phrase to describe “Arbuckle” and “Dick Diver”? The reader must add Arbuckle to the rearranged identities represented by a gallery of anagrammatic bodies that includes Dick, Dum­phry, Francisco, Devereux Warren, and the dead Jules Peterson. Fitzgerald imagines a string of fetish objects in which repetitive signifiers chart a psychosexual trauma. Roscoe “Fatty” Ar­buckle’s prominence in Hollywood as a silent screen comedian and filmmaker came to an abrupt halt after the events of Sep­tem­ber 5–6, 1921, in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. At the time, Arbuckle’s film career was rivaling that of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd; it is estimated that he was making a million dollars a year at Paramount. In a suite of hotel rooms registered to Arbuckle and

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others, a party guest named Virginia Rappe, a would-­be starlet and minor film player, was found dead of what was diagnosed as peritonitis because of a ruptured bladder.22 Maude Delmont, a female acquaintance of Rappe, testified to the police that Arbuckle had raped Virginia Rappe and caused her death. On Sep­tem­ ber 11, Arbuckle was arrested on charges of murder. His film career was immediately suspended as the Hearst newspapers picked up the cudgel to decry his degeneracy, which they labeled a “fat man’s foulness” that had crushed Rappe’s internal organs. After three trials and two hung juries, Arbuckle was acquitted on all charges, but the damage was lasting. He wrote and directed for over a decade under vari­ous pseudonyms, here and abroad, and was championed by many of his peers, in­clud­ing most prominently Buster Keaton. However, he never appeared on screen again and died in 1933 at age forty-­six as Fitzgerald was completing Tender. Fitzgerald most certainly recognized some affinities of Arbuckle with Dick Diver. Dick was simultaneously writer, director, and performer. His medical career was prominent but then had ended, winding down in one part of New York State or another. Both the Arbuckle incident and the Jules Peterson cover-­up take place in big city hotels. Fitzgerald reversed Dick’s roles from another perspective as well: he is not only Warren-­Arbuckle but also becomes the equivalent of the dead black man in Rosemary’s bed, the nightmares of white patriarchal incest and black male sexuality united. Also, Dick Diver exerts considerable effort in moving and arranging Peterson’s limp, dead body that is doll-­like in his hands. First, he holds the body so that “further hemorrhages from the wound would flow into the man’s clothes” and lays the body beside the bed. Then he drags the body into a position in the corridor so that it is in a neutral space away from ­Rosemary’s room (110–11). Dick’s actions to protect Rosemary do mime Arbuckle’s curious moving and resituating Rappe as she became ill in the hotel. First finding Rappe vomiting in a bathroom, he helped her into a bedroom and bed where she flopped down. Then she awoke and was incoherent, tearing at her clothes. Arbuckle tried to quiet her and moved her out of the party room suite. Then the treatment of Rappe turned truly bizarre. The admittedly inebriated guests provided suggestions that included standing her on her head to stop her hysteria and then immersing her in ice-­cold water, climaxing with Arbuckle putting a piece of ice on her vulva, saying “this will make her come to.” When nothing “worked,” Arbuckle took Rappe down the hall to another room, asking the manager to call a doctor, akin to Dick “calling in” Peterson’s murder. Rappe died on Sep­tem­ber 9, 1921. The repeated rearranging of Rappe’s conscious and unconscious form and the grotesque attempts to alternately shock and subdue her body stamp this scene with uncanny parallels to both ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s invasive sanitarium treatments and to Dick’s “arranging” of scenes and lives. Furthermore, Arbuckle’s attempts

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to deal with the Rappe affair in the hotel and after are as disastrous for him as is Dick’s decision to hand ­Nicole the bloody coverlets. Fitzgerald might have been uncannily influenced to parallel Arbuckle, Rappe, and Maude Delmont by Delmont, an opportunist, who attempted to portray Rappe (whom she hardly knew) and herself as intimates: “It’s my fault. I took her there. We were pals. She was like a sister to me” (Yallop 135); in effect, the “two sisters” take down Arbuckle as Dick is undone by the chaotic protection he affords Rosemary and ­Nicole over Peterson’s body. He symbolically “kills” ­Nicole who “indicts” him: “‘It’s you!’ she cried . . . intrud[ing] ‘on the only privacy I have in the world’” (112), in effect, referencing genitalia and internal organs. Freud in “The Uncanny” had stressed the “unheimlich place” of the female genitals as the entrance to the “former heim of all human beings.” This “primal fantasy of intrauterine existence” (Foster 8) is the sign under which the Arbuckle imaginary is grimly displayed onto Tender’s imaginary; in effect what Dick uncannily hands over to ­Nicole in lieu of sympathy is the violated insides of herself. No one is innocent in these narrative fantasies and refractions surrounding what became Fitzgerald’s finished text. This chain of uncanny narrative equivalences surrounding the Arbuckle case and the ­Nicole Diver case is not logical or conscious but is, like most of Tender’s deep sentimental structuring, refracted off surfaces of popu­lar culture by Fitzgerald, who shapes the anagrammatically rearranged pieces.

Enchaining the Uncanny: Dick’ s Key and Devereux Warren’s Rosary In Book Two, Dick is about to meet Franz and Dohmler for an important interview about his key role in ­Nicole’s treatment and “transference”: “By no conscious volition of his own, the thing had drifted into his hands. It reminded him of a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet, Dick knowing he had hid it in his mother’s top drawer; at that time he had experienced a philosophical detachment, and this was repeated now when he and Franz went together to Dohmler’s office” (139). The thing had drifted into his hands. Fitzgerald here uncannily echoes precisely Freud’s intimation of his own research into the uncanny itself when he wrote, “We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily” (“The Uncanny” 375, qtd. in ­Royle 13).23 Obviously Fitzgerald is also “keying” on key in a parody of an analytic reading by a depth-­Diver. Throughout Tender, Dick is haunted by what has become his responsibility: ­Nicole’s “case,” Peterson’s body, the “cover up,” and the bloody coverlets. To these can be added the key to his mother’s silver closet in what is the novel’s most revealing attempt to put Dr. Diver in the position of the analysand. The suggestive dreamscape memory has Dick in control of a key to “his mother,” one that he hides in her “top drawers” and thus feels a “philosophical

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detachment.” This is the sort of strange mixture of power and separation that portends the uncanny in a dissociation from self at the same moment an intense response is shaped. The lines suggest the key as phallus—perhaps the missing organ in Dick’s emasculation in the bathing drawers—as he waits to be anointed as the “key” to ­Nicole: doctor and possible lover. ­Nicole herself intuits the power of Dick’s “key” at the Diver party when she feels that “she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well” (168). Dick possesses the “key” to his mother, her womb a treasure of great price. The “closet” and “drawers” are womb-­compartments of a child’s security without the anxiety of the two dead sisters or his father’s presence.24 Dick’s memory of having the power of the “key” allows him to both become the mother and have power over her. For one suspensive moment, Dick actually knows where everything and everyone is, and he can be summoned to the psychiatric offices of the “father” (Dohmler) and son (Franz) to be hired on a big case. Such a moment is also emblematic of an author’s complete dominion over his characters and text.25 The fetish of the key gives Dick an object, “which can paradoxically both stand in for and confirm the absence of the maternal or female phallus” (C. Eby 170).26 The “philosophical ­detachment”—affect as thought lagging behind itself—is a non-­conscious intensity, a disconnect between his role and his desires; then he marches into Dohmler’s office to receive “the key” and the “closet” (­Nicole, her womb). The Peterson death scene and Dick with his mother’s key are among Fitzgerald’s strongest scenes of deep and reiterative commentary on gender, primal scenes, and death. Taken together, they comprise what Foster calls surrealism’s “celebrat[ing] desire only, in the register of the uncanny, to proclaim death” (11). The battle that Freud finally conceived as joined—that of Eros against Thanatos—is seen by Foster to be most emblematic of the uncanny’s motions when Freud wrote that the aim of Eros “is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus— in short to bind together.” The aim of Thanatos “is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things” (Civilization and Its Discontents 73–77). When Dick and ­Nicole play out these enormous and sad truths, the language is explicit. She tells him after the terrifying car ride, “You wanted to live!” (192), and later when Dick irrevocably declines, she reverses the judgment, “You used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up” (267). In the set of surreal substitutions, Dick Diver and Devereux Warren reign supreme. The only place in Tender when Dick and his paternal double meet is in the darkened hotel room in Lausanne. The interview is brief while Warren’s “emaciated fingers stirred a rosary on the white sheet.” Warren speaks of God’s forgiveness: “a Bigger Man than either of us says to forgive and to pity,” as he invokes the ultimate in authoritative discourse, that of the Law’s eternal justification; then “the rosary slipped from his weak hands and slid off the smooth bed covers. Dick

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picked it up for him” (248–49). In this scene, we may see a classic example of what Poovey calls a “text think[ing] beyond the author” (16) in which the rosary for an instant “drifts into Dick’s hands,” sliding off the bed cover like a key or segmented phallus and Dick restores it to him, in effect, what he has been doing for the Warren father through­out the novel. To restore the phallus to Warren at this point is to allow him to “stir” the rosary on the white sheets, to call up the defloration itself in ­Nicole’s bed and Rosemary’s bed. There is more than a hint of auto-­erotic “fingering” of the rosary-­Rosemary here as Dick gets to see the father in bed (a sex bed? a death bed?) where “rosemary”—a traditional symbol of remembrance, as is the rosary—is uncannily evoked. Rosemary herself has previously been described “as if her destiny were a picture puzzle . . . like stops on a string of beads” (104, emphasis mine). Thus the rosary functions as an “anagrammar” of rearranged symbols accessing the phallic body. The “thing” (the rosary) has come into his hands and in “picking it up for [Warren],” Dick hands back the key, the phallus. Our last view of Warren converts the prayer beads into what authorizes sexual power in the novel, going back to ­Nicole’s rape and beyond to Fitzgerald’s perceived parental coupling that conceived him and his siblings—basic units of interpretation in Tender Is the Night. Dick rearranges Warren’s beads and Warren then walks off his death bed “between the change of day and night nurses” (Tender 251). This is a wonderful image of the play of desire (leading to childbirth and nurses) and death and the final link in Fitzgerald’s chain of uncanny semblances (108–12, 139, 245–52). Fitzgerald makes Tender Is the Night uncannily coherent in its suggestiveness at the level of the language, “thinking” through the return of repressions. In Lausanne, Fitzgerald hurls Dick back to the dying father who “detaches” himself from the bed and walks away. The uncanny as a haunting presentation of prominent sentimental moments is one of Tender’s primary intensities of affect. The sentimental describes our affective response to these serious connections in language and image; the uncanny is our largely passive reception of what washes over us as intimately connected. Fitzgerald brilliantly tacks between heimlich and unheimlich in Tender Is the Night.

III Influences

7 “The Q ueen Moon Is On Her Throne” Fitzgerald’s Maternal Hero “Plagued By” Keats and Florence Nightingale Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Q ueen-­Moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. —Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”

The manuscript record and compositional process of Tender Is the Night yields excisions, lacunae, and uncanny physical and rhetorical returns, not the least of which are the ghosts of lines that Fitzgerald boldly cut from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” which prove provocative absences in Tender’s inscription: “And haply the Q ueen-­Moon is on her throne, / Clustered around by all her starry Fays.” Tender is haunted by Keats’ “immortal bird” as well as by the eminent Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale and her more disreputable fictional colleague, Dickens’ Sarah Gamp (see Chapter 8). Nowhere do these hauntings come together more powerfully than in the fig­ures of the mother and the nurse. They are fueled with the erotic charge of the violation which is recontained in both nature (birth) and nurture, in the bodily invasion of conception and childbirth and the sympathy. The “nurse-­r y” is a space of intimacy, vulnerability, primal scenes, and acts of love and outrage, ones never “forgotten,” yet literally and imaginatively irretrievable in language. In Tender, however, that role of sympathy is filled by Dick Diver who nonetheless is everywhere pressured to act in this role. How does Fitzgerald work through the images of maternity and nursing in Tender across a number of scenes and characters and interweave the images with the romance plot? One of the most powerful instances of the sentimental in mid-­nineteenthcentury Victorian culture was the domestic angel. The representation of this angel was extended onto the battlefield through the fig­ure of the heroic nurse, embodied most centrally in the West by the legendary fig­ure of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910). Her heroism in the Crimean War (1854–56) and long exemplary

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service as writer and reformer after the war made her a powerful woman in the pub­lic sphere even as she retained an almost mythical autonomous and reclusive state in England. Florence Nightingale is never mentioned in Tender by name, though nightingales real and altered are evident. However, the reader can gain a deeper understanding of Dick Diver’s view of his calling and Fitzgerald’s final sense of Dick’s symbolic resonance by chronicling the numerous mentions of nurses and the nursery, which function as another song and flight of a nightingale through the manuscripts. Fitzgerald did write a wary ode to his idea of the nightingale, which was varied and complex. He began with a fundamental opposition. Keats’ immortal bird sings in darkness, forsaking all other senses, while Fitzgerald’s prose was intensely visual and embodying rare beauty, both classical and through a cinematic framing. Thus the fig­ure of the nightingale may have begun as an homage to Keats, but it took on a welter of associations for Fitzgerald. Its symbology is deeply informed by lines that he excised from stanza four of Keats’ Ode that became Tender’s epigraph. The fig­ure of the “Q ueen Moon” that he suppresses and then absorbs is vital to his conception of how Dick Diver operates as a maternal presence as well as a source of power to his “starry fays” that orbit him. ­Nicole, ­Rosemary, and the Eczema Woman can be partially explained and characterized by their relation to nightingales and their legends, to Victorian nurses both real and imaginary, and to the “Q ueen Moon.” Finally, the nightingale was also personified in the increasingly drunken and desperate nurse—Dick Diver himself—whose very name is a sexual pun, paying tribute to the vulgarity of Dickens’ Mrs. Gamp. Fitzgerald could always navigate between Keats and Dickens, between the high romantic and the popu­lar sentimental. His consistent “plaguing” by the nightingale illuminates much about his fictional ethic in the way he was predisposed to absorb high and popu­lar culture materials as well as his relations with writer peers.

Dick Diver’s Maternal Appropriation Dick Diver is always “at the front,” always on duty in Tender Is the Night, as caretaker and guardian of ­Nicole’s sanity. In deep writerly structures, Fitzgerald is also on duty against ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s writing, while he repeatedly creates anagrammatic rearrangements of his two dead sisters. I’ve suggested that it’s his largely unconscious usurpation of the maternal in Tender that aligns him most closely with traditional sentimental responsibilities and pressures. Fitzgerald, because of temperament and novelistic instincts, understood in himself and his heroes a deep vein of feminine response that he openly explored but that was not without its discontents in his fiction. What Judith Fetterley calls the remaining “matricidal intent” in Tender in which she disparagingly suggested that Dick becomes “merely

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a mother” (“Who Killed Dick Diver” 118) is actually in the service of high sentimental caregiving and sympathy, an intimate current between and among male and female characters that Fitzgerald complexly believed in. Fitzgerald makes Dick’s maternal role another crisis in the on-­going male melodrama of self definition severely inflected by gender tensions. Mitchell Breitweiser points to Fitzgerald’s statement in “Author’s House” about the effect of the death of his two baby sisters on his writing; Breitweiser argues that this refers “not really to the two sisters’ deaths but rather to the mother’s loss of the two sisters,” which Fitzgerald describes as “the process whereby the mother’s grief developed into the life the son led.” Thus Fitzgerald’s “career begins in mourning but not his own” (248).1 One way for Fitzgerald to provisionally control and render the maternal imaginary— the “Q ueen Moon,” for example, purloined from Keats’ Ode and then ­absorbed— was to displace it into an image of nursing and the nursery and thus to allow himself a psychic corner of Victorian high and popu­lar culture drag. The hypothesis here is that Florence Nightingale and Dickens’ Sarah Gamp in their full range of associations worked on Fitzgerald’s creative consciousness to clear a space for gender and class commentary on the maternal through the fig­ure of the nurse in both whole-­souled and vicious/vicarious sentiment. As Fitzgerald developed the main plot of Tender Is the Night in 1932–33, it became a novel that notably voids itself of actual mothers. It also includes the disastrous moment of Devereux and ­Nicole Warren “consoling” each other over ­Nicole’s incestuous rape (Tender 129). Dick’s mother is dead before the novel opens and not nuanced for the reader. ­Nicole’s mother is part European minor royalty who dies while leading Baby and ­Nicole through Europe to introduce Baby into society just prior to World War I. Elsie Speers appraises daughter ­Rosemary more as an agent might, believing her seduction by Dick might deepen her emotional range. After her adolescent violation, ­Nicole becomes a vacant mother, closed off from her children who are “guided orphans” whom “she could only pretend to love” (180). Mary North is childless, though she becomes a stepmother. Baby Warren is unmarried, “onanistic,” and only interested in buying ­Nicole a doctor/husband who can replace their mother. Other emblematic maternal fig­ures also appear in Tender: frontier mothers who croon about no wolves at the door and Gold Star Mothers whose mourning makes rooms beautiful. This varied cast underscores Doctor Diver’s leading role in a take-­over of Tender’s maternal imaginary. As Book Two of Tender draws to a close, when Baby Warren is “roused” to get Dick out of jail, she exhibits what Fitzgerald calls “the clean-­sweeping irrational temper that had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent” (232); at this juncture Fitzgerald truly lets his animus rip against the maternal Ameri­can domestic heroine set against his admiration for the Gold Star Mothers. Ann Douglas formulates a view of female sentiment’s complicity in

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steep Ameri­can decline and states that such controlling women in their piety are partially responsible for the infantilizing of Ameri­can culture and men.2 When ­Rosemary reunites with the Divers in 1929, she asks Dick, “Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory anyhow? I feel as if I’d quarreled with mother” (219). Earlier in the novel, Rosemary triggers Dick’s anger when she innocently flirts with him and “for the first time, the mention of her mother annoyed rather than amused Dick. He wanted to sweep away her mother, remove the whole affair from the nursery footing upon which Rosemary persistently established it” (84–85); “sweep” is the exact verb with which Fitzgerald describes the Ameri­can woman who has “broken” the Ameri­can will. Maternal Dick “sweeps away” the adoring consciousness of Rosemary as daughter to assume control of the text’s subjective responses. Dick Diver has imaginative control of the novel for as long as he remains maternal himself. When that function wanes—as part of Fitzgerald’s effect of the narrative’s “dying fall”—so does Dick, his use value eclipsed, he is the novel’s matricide. When ­Nicole herself seeks a final vestige of Dick’s power and sympathy, she can only “continue her dry suckling at his lean chest” (279).3 We have already cited (Chapter 2) a scene in which Rosemary desires Dick Diver’s seduction and nourishment in undifferentiated states: she wanted “to devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him” (66). When Dick and ­Nicole share their dramatic kiss at the center of the West­ern world high above Lake Geneva, that kiss is once again a jumble of gendered and maternal-­infant identities: “There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale.” Dick “tastes” ­Nicole; their very atoms are pulled apart into a new atomic scale, not only as lovers-­to-­be but also rearranged into mother and infant son. She now has “a better hold on him,” almost as a mother getting the infant into position at the breast. ­Nicole’s face is “getting big every time she came close” (155), a cinematic close-­up on a large screen, which can also be of the breast swelling, curving into him to fill his field of vision. At this point, the breast itself has become the Q ueen Moon.

Keats’ Nightingale and the Q ueen Moon Fitzgerald worked within the power and poignancy of Keats’ dark night of song while appearing to rewrite several lines of the “Ode” according to his own narrative sensibility.4 On the night of the Divers’ high sentimental dinner party at the Villa Diana (“herself ” goddess of the moon), the Divers appear to make their own

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dinner table levitate in the care and concern for their guests, who then feel themselves momentarily transformed in the heightened imaginary: “the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them—the soft-­pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below—the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became part of them” (Tender 35). The dinner party recapitulates the Keatsian desire to both imbibe the warm draughts (“O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful ­Hippocrene” [“Ode to a Nightingale,” lines 15–16]) and then, numbed and satiated, the guests fade into the night (“leave the world unseen”) following the nightingale’s song. Keats strips the moon, stars, and light from the Ode, but Fitzgerald cannot do so in a work so intensely visual as Tender where everything is based on sight: for example, the levitation of the Divers and their party guests, the movies, the battlefield tour, faces coming up close, even Dick casting “wan light . . . into the darkness” for the Eczema Woman (242). Critics of Keats’ “Ode” tend to portray the Q ueen Moon and her fays as tangential to Keats’ central themes in the poem. Walter Jackson Bate calls the Q ueen Moon and her fays “two lines of futile ornament” (505), while Jeffrey Baker construes the lines as a temporary nod to Greek myth or Elizabethan convention; the Q ueen Moon’s function is to be decorative (144). Helen Vendler comments that the moon and starry fays are remembered from Milton’s “Nativity Ode.” They are excluded by Keats “by being put gently by” (90). James O’Rourke’s comprehensive reading finds the “Q ueen Moon . . . / Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays” as suggesting the fairy (fay) Titania (also cited by Baker), who is referred to four times in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the “Fairy Q ueen” (17). O’Rourke also cites the Q ueen Moon and clustered fays as the light from Ariadne’s Crown (her marriage crown given to her by Dionysus) (19).5 Fitzgerald, in his signature absorption of light and darkness, imagines the Q ueen Moon and the fays in a ritual performance of high sentiment for the Ameri­cans at the Diver party. The Ode’s motion is a full and melodious song that later becomes a requiem and anthem (Vendler 86), as exemplified in Tender by the death of the Eczema Woman and the decline and leave-­taking of Dick Diver. Fitzgerald seems most taken with ­Keats’ “Q ueen Moon” and her “fays” but cuts them from his published epigraph. The inscription in the novel from Keats’ stanza four reads as printed with the Q ueen Moon and her fays excised: .



Already with thee! tender is the night . . . . . . But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

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The Q ueen and her court of fairy attendants comprise the sentimental cadre in Tender. The novel does not lack for fairies (fays) in the vernacular sense, given Dick’s therapeutic and sympathetic identity expressly linked to his sensitivity. The male nightingale may very well be the bird which sings a sweet song during the breeding season; nonetheless, it’s the female roles that Dr. Diver most closely fulfills. I suggest Fitzgerald’s excision of Keats’ Q ueen Moon and her fays was in or­ der to absorb the lines for his own rich elaboration of the maternal and homo­ social imaginaries in Tender. However, the lines were wrong for Fitzgerald’s ­actual inscription to the novel, especially in Fitzgerald’s construction of a masculinity and dying fall. The Q ueen Moon is covertly enthroned in the novel with Fitzgerald working through her implications, the moon’s dangerous light in the darkness of relationships. The Q ueen Moon is power: Baby Warren, Mrs. Speers, and Dick Diver as care-­giver. The fays (Dum­phry, Campion, McKisco, Francisco, Lady Caroline, and Mary North) are so many ringed jewels. Early citings of the Q ueen Moon and fays may include the “white-­haired” Mrs. Abrams on the beach where “a tiara still clung to her head.” She is still in “full evening dress,” which is “a relic of the previous evening,” whereas ­Nicole has her bathing suit “sh[i]ne in the sun,” her brown back “set off by a string of creamy pearls” (6). Dick himself must be a constant like the “Q ueen Moon” and become the light in the darkness, in demand from moment-­to-­moment to assure his wife-­as-­patient. The pressures on Dick Diver are immense. In Tender’s logic, Dick wants to approach the throne, court the Q ueen (as in Gatsby), and play the gold-­hatted high bouncing lover, the son who lived, the child who can please her. To function, Dick must “de-­throne” the mother as queen in the logic of his own desiring and become her; he must perform a “soft” matricide in Fitzgerald’s favorite operation, an absorption that is also domination. When Dick is sitting with Francisco at the hotel in Lausanne, he is the Q ueen Moon who has just reasoned out the apotheosis of his sympathy and absorption of those early loved; he never feels more on his “throne.” F ­ rancisco has derisively been given the name the “Q ueen of Chili” at King’s College, Cambridge (244), and Dick identifies with him as a powerful “queen” who may be charm itself, which underwrites Dick’s sentimental performance. The personalities who “pressed up close to him” are his starry fays. The enchanted Diver party guests “surrounded by starry fays” morph into the gay “nest” in Lausanne from the Diver Manuscripts. Purloining “fay” from Keats’ Ode and then suppressing it leads to speculations about Fitzgerald’s on-­going play with the word during his writing career. A fay (or fairy) could be good or evil as a child or elf, an impish or hostile sprite with associations to “fey,” clearly in Fitzgerald’s mind denoting “enchanting,” “strange,” and “coyfully artfully affected,” which certainly describes Francisco in his “cou-

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rageous grace” combined with his “typically roguish look.” Fitzgerald had previously been fascinated by the word “fay,” which as a proper name had many associations for him.6 Daisy Fay Buchanan in Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s most famous “artfully affected” heroine while Msgr. Sigourney Webster Fay is a substitute father and “life” adviser to adolescent Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise. “Ted Fay” is an All-­Ameri­can football hero to Basil Duke Lee in “The Freshest Boy” (1928), a play on Ted Coy who had actually been an outstanding Yale fullback in 1914 when Fitzgerald was a Princeton freshman. “Fay” was clearly a supple, heroic, and androgynous designation for him before his transactions with Keats’ lines in Tender. The Divers at their party had begun to warm, glow, and expand, embodying the moon—they are at the height of their power as the faces of their guests (the good fays) turn up to them. Fitzgerald did not cut the Q ueen Moon, her throne, and the fays. He absorbed them as Diver “attendants,” party guests. For Fitzgerald, it’s not so much a matter of suppressing Keats’ lines but always an absorption. For example, ­Nicole swaps the role of Q ueen Moon with Dick at junctures in Tender. Montreux and Vevey are a “necklace and bracelet of lights” and “beyond them a dim pendant of Lausanne” (155); the Swiss towns are her starry fays. This scene is analogous to the Diver party scene, in which both ­Divers expand, warm, and glow until they might collectively be the Q ueen Moon. The last lines of the Diver dinner party paragraph echo the closing mood of the Ode, “Do I wake or sleep?”: What did we all feel? Were we really in “rare sentiment” for a moment? Other heralds of the Q ueen Moon also exist early in Tender. The Diver children, Topsy and Lanier, sing “Mon Ami Pierrot” to the assembled Diver party guests: “In the moonlight (au clair de la lune) My friend Pierrot, Lend me your pen to write a word” (29). Rosemary thinks that the Villa Diana is the “centre of the world” and after the party: “the others helped [Dick] carry lamps up—who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?” (37), perhaps a reference to (Florence) Nightingale’s roles on screen and off. About to walk the night and attempt to comfort Campion, “Rosemary lay awake suspended in the moonshine” (39). On the screen in Daddy’s Girl in the darkness (69), Rosemary herself is the Q ueen Moon, the audience her “starry fays.” When flirting with Dr. Diver in Switzerland, ­Nicole writes him, “I’ve thought a lot about moonlight, too” (122), and her lovely young face seems “just emerged from her hair . . . as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight” (135). Finally when she comes into her sexual free­dom, ­Nicole swims with Tommy in “a roofless cavern of white moonlight,” then “tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover” (297–8). ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman are clearly limned through Keats’ imagery of voice, darkness, and light. ­Nicole’s firmest association with the “Ode” is in

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her decoration and concealment of the bars in the hopeless wards at the clinic, “houses for those sunk into eternal darkness” (181), which are named “Eglantine” and “Beeches,” both of which are referenced in Keats’ “Ode” (Stanza 1, lines 7–9; Stanza 5, line 46). ­Nicole is also the novel’s synesthetic gardener, never more at peace and out of reach of Dick’s surveillance than when she is walking the paths below the Villa Diana or working in her flowers. Fitzgerald tests his capacities for dramatic statement by way of Keats’ dramatic darkness. The Eczema Woman whose eyes are “too tightly swollen . . . spoke in a rich, deep thrilling voice” (song of the nightingale?) (184), singing in the face of blindness and death. Her voice is like the dying Devereux Warren’s “thick burr of individuality” (248). Both voices relate to the “wan light” Dick “throws” into the “darkness ahead” (242) for his dying woman patient as Fitzgerald unites voice and sight in Dick’s role as attending nurse at her last moments. A further reference to the nightingale that works with and beyond Keats’ Ode may be in its relation to the classical myth of Philomela and Procne, the two Greek sisters who suffer violent abuse and take terrible revenge, causing the gods to turn them into birds. Such a drama with two sisters had to have appealed to Fitzgerald in the throes of his most powerful imaginary. To amend Philomela and Procne to the characters and story in Tender, ­Nicole is raped and essentially voiceless; it is her rapist father who narrates the act. ­Nicole expresses herself through “weaving” not a tapestry but the black lace bathing trunks exposing a “truth” about Dick; she also does the filigree work on the bars of the clinic, decorating and masking her prison. Philomela was kept in the woods so Tereus could come back and rape her whenever he wanted, which recalls Father Warren and their “mornings,” Dick and their life at the clinic, repression, and silence. Tereus, marrying one sister and raping the other, provides in one mythical fig­ure the twinning of Dick Diver and Devereux Warren. Philomela’s sister Procne, the aggressive sister, wife, and mother, does terrible battle, murdering her own child. Procne as the Eczema Woman in Tender agonizingly asks Dr. Diver, in effect, what her rebellion was for: “How long will this last? Is it going to be forever?” she wonders “in a strong, rich, deep, thrilling voice”(184). Her bitter comment, “I am here as a symbol of something” (185) is a fitting statement for a mythological character like Procne. ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman literally share the same page as “sisters” (183)—­Nicole as Philomela silently decorating the “tapestry” of the prison bars, the Eczema Woman (as Procne) singing her pain about doing battle with men. Together as compound sister-­ghosts, they provide the story of Dick’s sexuality and caregiving, the seduction and sympathy at the core of his sentimentalism, and Fitzgerald’s real containment of both fig­ures. ­Nicole Diver is essentially a voiceless Philomela, while the Eczema Woman is without visual life, an outwardly grotesque body who can only speak (sing) her

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tale of heroism and defeat—a Procne embittered in desire with her voice upwelling through her tightly closed eyes. Rosemary is powerfully presented through the filmic gaze, the camera that then arrays and displays her for the reader. She is a silent film star who signifies through facial expression, eyes, and costuming.7 Silent ­Nicole has made Dick something to wear on the beach that the audience can “read” by seeing. ­Nicole’s “visual tricks” are analogous to Dick’s “tricks of the heart,” self-­described by him as the artifice in his sympathy and manners. What makes Dick’s scene with the Eczema Woman so devastating is that they perform a disembodied dialogue that plays on the conventions of an analyst not “seeing” the patient. The scene could be taking place in complete darkness; there are no visual cues in their dialogue about the meaning of suffering. We move so swiftly from ­Nicole’s scene to that of the Eczema Woman (183). The two women are imprisoned “sisters,” enjambed together and both under severe constraint from Dick and Fitzgerald: Philomela and Procne without voice and sight, respectively.

Florence Nightingale To shift Fitzgerald’s focus from Keats and romantic poetry to nineteenth-­century British history, Florence Nightingale’s remarkable career and resultant myth took the fig­ure of the nurse from its disreputable status to a romantic and upper class dream of service for young women to do meaningful work outside the home. To exhume and criti­cally foreground some of Fitzgerald’s deep conceptions of Dick Diver’s nursing role is to gauge what and who remained lodged within the text’s unconscious, the two most famous Victorian nurses: Florence Nightingale and Dickens’ Sarah Gamp. One is legendary and one is fictional, but they play criti­cal roles in explaining the heroic psychiatrist’s truest maternal and sentimental feelings to himself and to the reader. Fitzgerald’s own declining health in the 1930s, punctuated by serious alcoholism, also made him an authority on nurses and care. In fact, nurse heroines as recording consciousnesses appear in two of his short stories: “Her Last Case” (Saturday Evening Post Nov. 3 1934) and the less substantial “An Alcoholic Case” (Feb. 1937 Esquire). In “An Alcoholic Case,” the unnamed young nurse is gentle and impressionable when she meets her declining male employer, a dedicated drunkard. She is a child of popu­lar culture who is absorbed in reading Gone with the Wind and also her “brown eyes were alight with a mixture of thoughts—the movie she had just seen about Pasteur and the book they had all read about Florence Nightingale when they were student nurses” (440). Here is Fitzgerald’s only citation of Nightingale. No written evidence exists in his plans or commentary on Tender that he was working with her image in the novel. Yet Nightingale is entirely representative of the sentimental Victorian culture

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that Fitzgerald is enamored with and Dick Diver longs for. However, at his most versatile, Dick could only bow to the myriad associations surrounding Nightingale. She was the only certified English hero/heroine to emerge from the Crimean War, the first modern conflict prefacing the slaughter of the Ameri­can Civil War and World War I. Nightingale’s superintendency of a large field hospital in Scutari, Turkey, made her name famous through­out Europe and America. An unmarried, attractive, aristocratic daughter, she almost single-­handedly changed the conception of nursing and placed it on a professional footing. She fought diligently for better sanitary conditions in hospitals and in the Indian army. After 1857, she lived a long reclusive life as writer and reformer, passing away in 1910 long out of the pub­lic eye but never forgotten. Her Notes on Nursing (1859) has defined the profession for generations as a book of homiletics and practical strategies; it sold fifteen thousand copies in a month and has never been out of print. Dick Diver’s Psychology for Psychiatrists, his “first little book” that “contains the germ of all he would ever think or know” (165), what Franz chides him should be subtitled “Deep Thoughts for the Layman” (138), is perhaps Fitzgerald’s analogous text in Tender. Nightingale formalized nursing and the dispensing of care even as Freud and psychiatry placed sympathy into a therapeutic framework, thus providing the female and male narratives of personal ministration, which intersect in tension and complementarity within Dick Diver. Nightingale was one of Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” and was the subject of ballads, inexpensive portraits, and figurines. She could easily have been cited in Dick Diver’s catalogue of “whole-­souled sentimental” nineteenth-century icons such as Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne. In the sense of her high bourgeois role as nursing heroine, Nightingale converts the maternal-­romantic maddened “Q ueen Moon” to “The Lady with the Lamp.” Mary Poovey also cites a similarity to Q ueen Victoria who was “compared less frequently” to a military commander than to a loving mother; Vic­toria and Nightingale were also the same age, and an early newspaper biography begins, “Young (about the age of our Q ueen), graceful, feminine, rich and popu­lar, [Nightingale] holds a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom she comes in contact” (171). Florence Nightingale also appropriated male authority to transform certain perceptions of a female field of praxis and endeavor. For ­Nicole, Rosemary, and the Eczema Woman, to be “plagued” by Nightingale is to be plagued by choices outside family and marriage where a woman could never reconcile clashing identities except through myth making and/or hysteria. Tender’s women repeatedly fracture the Nightingale identity. Rosemary attempts to help Campion in his distress, the Eczema Woman is fearless and strong, yet she is succumbing to the physical pain of her disfig­urement in the “war” for woman’s autonomy. Dick Diver, an Ameri­can boy who wants to be brave, kind, and good,

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walks the WWI battlefield, shining light (his lamp) and diagnoses nineteenth-­ century Europe and its collective malady through a cluster of sentimental images of home, family, and country. Sentiment in the early twentieth century becomes nostalgia for the nineteenth-­ century climate of sentiment, where a Florence Nightingale might express huge contradictions for Fitzgerald. Florence Nightingale was as rich as the Warren sisters, much more knowledgeable about the butchery of war than Dick Diver, and, like Dr. Diver, a self-­willed internal exile after her heroism as a writer-­healer. ­Every indication suggests she had a mental breakdown after her great triumph, what one writer has called “a creative psycho neurosis,” a sub-­species of war trauma (Bullough 24). It is likely she privately condemned herself as a failure for having incorrectly gauged the way infection spread in her contagious wards, which she believed led to countless more deaths (Small 128–31). Contemporary psychoanalytic attempts to understand her isolation during the long half-­century between her war triumph and her death in 1910 center on the hypothesis that she felt her heroism had been a sham and that she privately circulated the fact (Small 153, 197). In an 1865 letter, she wrote, “I lost my serenity some years ago—then I lost my clearness of perception, so that sometimes I did not know whether I was doing right or wrong for two minutes altogether” (Hobbs 95). Something of Dick Diver’s renouncing his psychiatric practice and choosing voluntary exile from family is certainly possible. Fitzgerald’s intimation of Nightingale may have been as an immensely pub­lic fig­ure as a nurse who then collapsed, became reclusive, and knew herself too well. Nightingale became her own final enigmatic patient in a self-­seclusion that yielded books and reforms, if not recovery. If Fitzgerald could overtly analogize Dick Diver through­out Tender to General Ulysses Grant, in­clud­ing Grant’s exile to Galena, and by extension, his disgraced presidential term and final death bed triumph as a writer, why couldn’t Dick be Nightingale as well in similar serial roles as a powerful Victorian woman and renowned through a major war before a long sec­ond career as writer and reformer? Dick Diver is both the general who wants the summer to die violently (37–38) and the nurse who will care for ­Nicole: “before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and tomorrow, next week and next year” (166). The Florence Nightingale whom Fitzgerald may have intuited embodies the following: a young well-­bred woman full of idealism who wants to be kind and good and goes on a “great case” in Europe in the pub­lic eye. She becomes a nursing angel, retaining a woman’s power in the face of male doctors, generals, and armies, and reigns as a heroine of both military and domestic narratives. Poovey has cited Nightingale’s candid knowledge of what nurses faced in the intimate care of male soldiers, the bathing, touching, battling against masturbation, homosexuality, and heterosexual advances toward the nurses themselves, how nurses

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at Scutari, and by extension elsewhere in wartime, were not only caregivers but on duty as agents of sexual surveillance, enforcing morality in the most extreme bodily and spiritual situations (181). Thus the nurse’s closeness to subjects covered in the sexual sciences by Freudian interpretation is clear. Perhaps Dick Diver sitting up three nights with the dying Eczema Woman (Tender 242) is a wartime nurse speaking to a gravely wounded soldier (in the battle between the sexes), making her last moments bearable. The nurse as conceived by Nightingale could also be called “a literal or metaphorical (middle-­class) mother” with the maternal instinct that “to the Victorians invested all women with putative moral power” (Poovey 185, 187): a formidable Q ueen Moon indeed. How Fitzgerald might have personally wished the nursing tale might be told can be found in “Her Last Case,” a minor story that, in effect, stars a ­Rosemary as an eager young nurse caring for a romantic alcoholic patient. Tellingly, Fitzgerald did not wish to reprint the story in Taps at Reveille, writing to Max Perkins that “most of it depends on a mixture of hysteria and sentiment” (571). “Her Last Case” contains almost all of Tender’s nursing outtakes laid out in simple fashion. Nurse Bette Weaver, affianced to a doctor, makes her way south into Virginia on a final nursing assignment deep into Jeb Stuart country (also the terrain of Dick Diver’s paternal ancestors). She is a child of the movies and imagines “Marion Davies in a hoop skirt dancing . . . with Confederate officers” and knows that “Chateau-­Thierry came a little later” (572). Her patient, Ben Dragonet, is a handsome World War I veteran with a family tragedy: twin airmen brothers killed aloft, perhaps stolen from Faulkner’s Sartoris (1927). Dragonet is Dick/ Scott glamorized in his cups with a charming, spirited young woman he can instruct on his home, the South, its ghosts, and the past in the manner that Dick educated Rosemary on the French trenches. Dragonet is also uncomfortably like a Devereux Warren, “tall and well-­built” (574). Bette Weaver learns more about Dragonet’s tragedy through a veritable menagerie of family members and employees. Of course, Nurse Weaver decides to stay with him for she knows in love “that her last case was going to last forever” (590), an ominous line that expressed a sentimental wish by Fitzgerald for his own care and happiness and the nakedness of his need.8

Fitzgerald’s Nightingale: Rosemary Plays Nurse How did Fitzgerald perhaps conceive of Keats’ nightingale and Florence Nightingale working together as images in Tender? The one mention of Keats in the text occurs when Dick veers sharply away from Rosemary after they trade recriminations in Rome in Book Three and Dick sets off on a brooding drinking bout. He muses on an earlier walk to “the house where Keats had died. He cared only

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about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events. Rome was the end of his dream of Rosemary” (220). The “he” in this quote can also be construed as Fitzgerald himself espousing an ethic of selection and subject against that of Keats; indeed, Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins approvingly that Wordsworth did with people what Keats did with memory, that he himself wished to express emotion through characters, not environment.9 After the Keats citation, a bellboy comes in to give Dick a note from Rosemary: “I did not go to the party, I am in my room. We leave for Livorno early in the morning” (220). Rosemary (as nightingale?) sings to him of unrequited love one last time, but Dick’s descent is well under way and he chooses to go off drinking with Collis Clay instead. The one extended use of nightingales in Tender features Rosemary haunting the romantic night. After her first declaration of love for Dick, she lies awake and restless, “cloaked by the erotic darkness” in a “limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star” (39), her sight becoming dimmer and harder as Fitzgerald sets the scene for the nightingale imagery.10 Like Keats’ narrative sensibility in the “Ode,” she is sleepless and tilting toward the night and its power. She walks out on the terrace into the false dawn: “There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-­natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court. . . . Beyond the inky sea and far up that high black shadow of a hill lived the Divers. She thought of them both together, heard them still singing faintly a song like rising smoke, like a hymn, very remote in time and far away. Their children slept, their gate was shut for the night” (40). In the first Diver Manuscript, Fitzgerald had written after “tennis court” “and she thought it might be a nightingale” (First Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 136, emphasis mine).11 However, Fitzgerald chose to excise the specific nightingale reference and complicate matters with his peevish bird set against the song of the imagined domestic romance, the peace and security of Dick and ­Nicole together singing “faintly,” their life perfect and serene. To borrow from Keats, the “plaintive anthem fades” as it recedes “Up the hill side; and now ’tis buried deep / in the next valley-­glades” (“Ode” lines 75–77). At poem’s end, the nightingale’s song is barely discernible, and perhaps dreamed (“Do I wake or sleep?”). Rosemary emotionally stretches toward the Divers’ unattainable life song, dresses in a light gown and slippers, and goes out into the night only to come upon Campion grieving in unrequited love for Dum­phry with the ensuing parody of sentiment (see Chapter 2). Rosemary is caught in an extended pun: as a “silent” film star, her voice is never heard on screen but her gestures are broad and strong. Had Rosemary been tracked another decade into her Hollywood career, a logical screen role for her might have been as Florence Nightingale. She is a nurse, in effect, the lady as the lamp, walking to Campion as to a sobbing casualty (“What is it . . .? Can I help

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you? . . . do you want to tell me?” [41]).12 The mood is crushed, Campion longs for sympathy, but Daddy’s Girl cannot “nurse” him despite miming Dick Diver’s role as both analyst and nurse. Punctuating their comic “mis-­exchange,” “a shutter opened suddenly in a room two stories above and an English voice spat distinctly: ‘Will you kaindlay stup tucking!’” (41). A decidedly un-­Keats-­like Col. Blimp has been an even more “ill-­natured” bird, hoping to squelch the dialogue in the darkness about romantic discontents. When Campion gives in to one last burst of self-­pity, “rocking to and fro with sorrow,” the “same British voice” intones from above, “Rilly, this must stup immejetely.” This English nightingale is having none of a gay male’s unrequited love and effectively censors the entire scene from a Victorian morality.13 In ancient Greek and Roman poetry, the nightingale is always personified as a female singer; this convention has been relatively stable through­out literary history (McKusick 3). Thus there is a continual gender slippage in poetry with the male bird adapted to be a female singer. In Tender, Campion, a male “bird” in unrequited love for another male, is told by a third angry male voice to “stup tucking!” (41–42). By the Renaissance, the nightingale in poetry could be either masculine or feminine, depending on the poet and the occasion. ­Edmund Spenser refers to Sir Walter Raleigh as a nightingale in a sonnet and as the Q ueen ­“Cinthia’s” forbidden lover, with “Cinthia” (a fig­ure for Elizabeth I) fig­ured as a moon goddess (McKusick 4). Perhaps this fig­ure could be extended to ­Keats’ Q ueen Moon, who may also be appropriated by Fitzgerald in her absence—“absorption” and then “leaving out” in his familiar mode as novelist. In the scene after the Diver party, nightingales may abound, each singing a solitary song while the Divers are “still singing faintly a song like rising smoke” (40) atop their hill. Coleridge’s poem “The Nightingale” (1798) included lines such as “So many nightingales; and far and near, / In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, / They answer and p­ rovoke each other’s song, / With skirmish and capricious passagings” (lines 67–70 qtd. in McKusick 6). Such a profusion is endemic to Tender’s cast in the darkness. Voices of insistent birds include Violet McKisco saying what she heard upstairs in the Diver bathroom, Tommy Barban in “a voice for cavalry” (44) warning her to stop, Albert McKisco telling Tommy to shut up, and Rosemary solicitously offering to help Campion, who warbles of unrequited love: all of these are competing sad and angry songs. When Abe North—Tender’s most unsentimental fig­ure—asks Campion and Rosemary what they’re doing up at night, they move away from the insistent English voice, and Abe intones, “Plagued by the nightingale . . . probably plagued by the nightingale,” which is literally and figuratively true. Campion departs and Abe tells Rosemary of the bizarre duel coming between McKisco and Tommy Barban, concluding the chapter with “It certainly is coo-­coo but it seems to be true”

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(43); this subsuming of Keats and his “immortal Bird” into the night’s comedy is an unfitting end. The nightingale is downgraded to a cuckoo, a bird with the least interesting of songs, and it is rendered here in a bad sing-­song (coo-­coo/ true) rhyme.14 Some female cuckoos are brood parasites, laying eggs in nests of other birds, sneaking in and destroying eggs already there, and then laying their own. Violet McKisco barrels in and destroys the peace and charm of the Diver “nest” with her revelation that sets in motion the outing of ­Nicole as a “cuckoo.” Fitzgerald’s extended scene with the cuckoo trumping the nightingale “plagues” the nightingale aura and rewrites the heightened mood of Keats’ great “Ode” into a parody of sympathy and nursing care. It is wholly in keeping with Fitz­ gerald’s balancing act in Tender through the continual mixed modes of high romance and low popu­lar forms. At the golf course duel, the pistol shots of Barban and McKisco go wide, McKisco vomits, and a French doctor in attendance subsequently demands a fee. Since a “nurse” is not needed on this field of battle, Rosemary wraps the farce, “suddenly hysterical with laughter” (51), kicking with her “espadrille” at her reluctant “patient,” the prostrate Campion who has fainted from excitement. Fitzgerald and the reader are a long way from real nurses, patients, and battlefields. Nothing at the duel or in the dark romantic night that a nurse or a nightingale—or Rosemary as both—can comfort or solve.

“Plagued by the Nightingale”: Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, and Kay Boyle Beyond the specific parody of Rosemary walking the Keatsian night as a nursing fig­ure akin to a Florence Nightingale are Fitzgerald’s cleverly masked references to several prominent modernist literary lives. The specific line “plagued by the nightingale” may stem from Marianne Moore’s poem “Marriage” (1923) and from the title of a 1931 novel by Kay Boyle. The tangled web of potential nightingale references must begin with Robert McAlmon, the Ameri­can expatriate writer who was an acquaintance of so many writers abroad during the 1920s and who mightily “plagued” both Hemingway and Fitzgerald with his gossipy assertions about their homosexuality. McAlmon was the publisher of Contact Editions, which brought out Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Ameri­cans as well as books by William Carlos Williams, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, and Hemingway’s first volume, three stories and ten poems (1923). McAlmon tried to scandalize Gerald and Sara Murphy with four-letter words and eagerly provided details of his sex life (Vaill 138). Mc­ Almon fits the profile on many points as a source for the hapless Albert McKisco. Fitzgerald labels McKisco as a writer who nails a huge popu­lar success by simplifying materials of his betters with “his gift for sof­tening and debasing” (205).

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Furthermore, McKisco is also plagued by the nightingale: he can’t stop talking, nor can his wife who blurts and bleats over what she has seen of ­Nicole in the Diver bathroom. Fitzgerald was not above displacing his own antics onto McKisco. He once followed two young Frenchmen around a casino dance floor, asking them over and over if they were fairies to the embarrassment of Archibald MacLeish’s wife Ida who was dancing with one of them. At a Murphy party, Scott plagued a young writer and pianist, Eugene McGowan, by asking, “Are you a homosexual?” When McGowan said he was, Scott persisted, “What do you people do?” Scott then wound down by throwing figs at a principesse, whereupon Gerald asked MacLeish to take him outside. When Scott threw a punch, Gerald remembers MacLeish “knocked him cold” (Vaill 183). Thus there is a veritable roster of men with similar names in Fitzgerald’s cast, in­clud­ing a McGowan and a MacLeish as well as a McAlmon and McKisco. Robert McAlmon met Fitzgerald for the first time in 1925 (Bruccoli, Price 236), and it’s possible McAlmon’s waspishness and irritability may also be a model for that of Francis Melarky. Could Melarky also be a compound ghost that includes the young Hemingway? Based on the evidence in the last three decades of Hemingway biography and criticism, Ernest could be posited as the boy who would have felt he had “reason” to kill his mother. McKisco’s wife Violet supports her husband and is overly effusive when lavishing praise upon him to the Diver circle, perhaps in reference to the insistent Pauline Pfieffer, who became Hemingway’s sec­ond wife in 1926. McAlmon envied the success of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and later spread gossip about them as gay. Consider the beach scene with the black lace drawers from the perspective of McKisco-­McAlmon as an apology for the “pansy’s trick” remark to a Hemingway-­Campion and a Fitzgerald-­Dum­phry. Campion is certainly a Hemingway fig­ure with “his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in” and “a pair of tights” (5)—this description certainly matches a famous Hemingway beach photo, minus the ­monocle and “slow Oxford drawl.”15 By 1929, McAlmon has made libelous remarks to ­Maxwell Perkins about Scott and Ernest, who in turn tells Fitzgerald, who then calls McAlmon a “bitter rat” and a “failed” writer who was “tying up to the big boys like Joyce and Stein.” In Tender, Violet McKisco touts her husband to ­Rosemary as the man who wrote the first criticism of Joyce in America (10); she’s trying to impress and insult Rosemary at the same time. A few years earlier, McAl­mon had assured Ernest that Scott was a fairy and had then told Morley Cal­la­ghan that Ernest was. After this vertiginous round of gossip, after Perkins tells Scott, Scott tells Ernest, who then writes Perkins about McAlmon’s accusations that Pauline is a lesbian and Ernest is gay (Donaldson 154). Perkins thought it all malicious envy from McAlmon, who himself was clearly attracted to male partners, beginning in the 1920s. Fitzgerald writes to Hemingway in June 1934 about his ad-

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miration for Hemingway’s “dying fall” and admits, “I imitated it . . . as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of Tender, trying to let [Dick] come to bat for me rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with MacCallaghan [Morley Callaghan] or McKisco, Sweetie?)” (Bruccoli, Life in Letters 264). It is interesting that Scott did not tell Ernest anything about ­Zelda’s allegation that they were lovers; it would be one thing to jocu­larly indict McAlmon to Ernest and another to quote ­Zelda on the subject; at her sanitariums in both France and Switzerland, she told the same story—that her husband was a homosexual in love with Ernest Hemingway (Donaldson, 158, 160).



Marianne Moore’s poem “Marriage” prominently features the line “plagued by the nightingale,” while Moore herself is associated with McAlmon and his wife Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in the 1920s. In Moore’s poem, the nightingale is the woman and wife whom the husband will never understand; they are config­ured through an Adam and Eve dialogue.16 Physical attributes of the nightingale match several Tender characters and their probable models. The male nightingale is the singer, a reddish brown bird that sings day and night during breeding and nesting. Dick Diver is described as a gruff, red bird (218) and is alluded to at novel’s end through the “lone cyclist in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun” (309). McAlmon is described as an irritable redhead, akin to Francis Melarky. In Tender, Albert McKisco is “a scrawny freckle-­and-­red man of thirty” who is “burning visibly” on the beach (8) and is marriage-­plagued. This matrix of McAlmon, Melarky, McKisco, and Dick Diver may be identified by the following features: the red hair, women troubles (Francis and “goddam these women” in “Wanda Breasted”), and intemperate speech. Is “plagued by the nightingale” in the Tender manuscripts as far back as the Melarky drafts? The golf course duel is certainly there from the outset, as is the Diver dinner party (hosted by Seth and Dinah Piper in “Melarky”). Bruccoli’s analy­sis of the Tender manuscripts suggests there are only six pages total from the Melarky Manuscript in the golf course duel material. However, there are thirty new manuscript pages in what became chapters 8 through 11 of Book One in the holograph of the first Diver draft. The odds are overwhelming that these include the “plagued by the nightingale” line.17 Late in life (1957), Moore was firm that women must choose from among their many options, with marriage as only one. Among other women, she cited Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and Marie Curie (Bergman 241). Moore was plagued by Bryher’s marriage to McAlmon; H. D., Bryher’s lover and potentially Moore’s, was crushed by it. Bryher, H. D., and Moore comprise a mé-

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nage of sorts, perhaps the very talented sisters of the “three cobra women” (Tender 73) who dissect Dick and menace Rosemary. McAlmon certainly felt used by all these elusive women. If Bryher’s West is accurate, it was Moore, not McAlmon, who was first invited to return to England with Bryher and H. D. Bergman believes that the poem “Marriage” reflects Moore’s “much more intense response to women than to men” and questions, “why marry?”. Moore was convinced that the McAlmon-­Bryher marriage was one of convenience and that marriage itself continues because it is an “institution” (Bergman 250–51). Dick Diver is without means but is purchased with the Warren fortune along with the clinic for ­Nicole, a cold example of “why marry?” indeed.



Kay Boyle’s novel, Plagued by the Nightingale (1931), has further links to the ubiquitous McAlmon and to Fitzgerald’s subject in Tender. McAlmon is the proverbial 1920s Ameri­can literary scapegoat, for as Smoller states, “McAlmon in the criti­cal line is unfulfilled, querulous, envious, deviant—most certainly the most vilified unread writer in modern Ameri­can literature” (xliii). Yet Kay Boyle was his staunch supporter over the decades. McAlmon’s The Nightinghouls of Paris, written but not published until 2007, may have taken its title from Boyle’s 1931 novel.18 Boyle then reissued and added to McAlmon’s memoir of 1920s Paris in Being Geniuses Together (1938, 1968). What may have interested Fitzgerald most about Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale was its French expatriate setting, young Ameri­can heroine, and the incestuous family tale that threatens to consume her, as the Warren family history threatens ­Nicole. Boyle’s Bridget marries Nicolas and encounters his inbred, tightly knit family with marriageable sisters and bitter male relations within a reticent aristocracy. The three unmarried sisters are all ominously cast: Julie is eighteen but has had no periods, “not like an ordinary girl”; Annick would be happy in a convent and Marthe with the family taint wants to marry Luc, a young doctor (Boyle 91). Their brother Nicolas has inherited the family’s incurable bone disease; his sister Charlotte has married her first cousin Pierre and borne five children with brittle legs; the cause is what Katherine Anne Porter decorously called “a taint in the blood that causes eccentrics and paralytics in every generation” (Hollenberg 509). Charlotte pines for the nightingale that has ceased to sing at her window, but Bridget buys a bird for her that won’t sing. Both birds are symbols of violation and silence, as is ­Nicole in Tender who stands in a shop with a “love bird on her shoulder, and had one of her infrequent outbursts of speech” (55). In Boyle’s last scene, Bridget, who has become something like a Q ueen Moon with agency, frees Luc from marrying Marthe because she tells him she will be having a child with Nicolas to satisfy the family: “What was the nightingale’s small liberty to the deep wide exemption she had given Luc, she thought. . . . She had breathed into his nostrils and he had revived” (190). Early

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on in Tender, when Violet McKisco is talking up her husband’s awful “big” novel to Rosemary, she says “He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age” (10). Was that Fitzgerald’s disapproving nod to Boyle’s novel? He would have known the regard between Boyle and McAlmon and perhaps would have had reason enough to purloin her title. His disapproval may have extended to his framing “plagued by the nightingale” in such a bald satire through the interactions and dialogue among Rosemary, ­Campion, and Abe North. Fitzgerald indeed may have woven a “tapestry” on his and Hemingway’s discontents with McAlmon and the links to Moore and Boyle with their pointed usage of “plagued by the nightingale.”19

Conclusion In Tender Is the Night, references to nightingales and nursing are stitched through­ out, freely adapting Keats’ enchanted night and tonal romance to the farce of ­Rosemary’s “care,” both offered and rejected. Fitzgerald made deft use of both high (Keats) and popu­lar (Florence Nightingale) traditions in signature modernist collage. It’s incongruous on the one hand to read Fitzgerald laboring in the “blindness” of the nightingale’s dark night when he is the most visual of writers. On the other hand, it may be why he had to absorb the Q ueen Moon and starry fays, to internalize and utilize that light. The Eczema Woman in Tender was denied that visual world, for Fitzgerald wasn’t sharing Dick Diver’s light with her and she could no longer paint. To honor and to parody are perhaps the twin impulses that would validate one of the most familiar of Fitzgerald maxims: “The test of a truly first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still function” (The Crack-­Up). The aesthetic and tropological range of Tender among so many disparate emotional states and depths of feeling suggests that Fitzgerald passed the test to his reader’s delight and instruction, nowhere more playfully than with Keats’ immortal bird and the Lady with the Lamp. Dick cannot be left to work out his unique perception because Fitzgerald “plagues” him with the nightingale and with Nightingale. Fitzgerald may have reserved the Q ueen Moon lines for himself in Tender Is the Night and, having absorbed them, he melded the romantic and maternal within the sentimental. The Q ueen Moon lines suggest “how many women is power,” which is analogous to Fitzgerald’s similarly suppressed Sarah Gamp statement in the Diver Manuscripts, to which we now turn.

8 “How Many Women Is Power” Dickens’ Sarah Gamp and Ventriloquizing the Sentimental

Immediately before Florence Nightingale’s emergence, the Victorian nurse best known to a popu­lar audience would have been Sarah Gamp from Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). Gamp is a garrulous, drunken hireling who sat nestled in cozy comfort with the genteel almost dead, consuming their food and drink while she held hilarious brow-­beating colloquies with her desperately ill charges. Between Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Gamp—an officially representative Victorian and a disreputable popu­lar one—there’s a lot of action, and no one has analyzed how Fitzgerald perhaps referenced them in Tender Is the Night, with Dick Diver as a sort of familiar compound ghost, trailing clouds from two legendary nurses. In the 1932–33 Diver Manuscript versions of Tender, Fitzgerald had, through Sarah Gamp, experimented with an abrupt and oblique rendering of the power of women. Then he ultimately cut the lines from the published novel. Dick Diver’s final interview above the beach on the Riviera with Mary North (Tender 313– 14) was to have ended with him drunkenly exclaiming: “Then under the impression he was still talking to Mary he mumbled in a loud voice—‘Final message of Sairy Gamp, the drunken nurse: power measured in women. How many women is power. Women are the real gold standard’” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 612). The invocation of Sarah Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit burlesques and throws into another register Fitzgerald’s intimation of how Dick Diver had become a complex avatar of womanly power. Mrs. Gamp holds significant associations of class resentment for Fitzgerald; she is a disheveled Victorian eccentric who seems something like the portrait bequeathed to us of Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald in her more benignly addled status. In the Diver Manuscripts, it’s

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Gamp who departs the novel with the heroic romantic doctor and son, leading to the speculation that it may have been Gamp speaking to us in part all along; it’s her “final” message,” after all. Yet Fitzgerald cut these lines from the published novel. A further interpretive dilemma in Tender Is the Night is to determine how “Gamp” relates to the nightingale passages, to both Keats and the divine Florence, and to understand Fitzgerald’s satire of them with the McKiscos, Campion, and cuckoos. Nightingale and Gamp as whole-­souled and vicious sentimental Victorian nurse icons battle for control of Doctor Diver’s sensibility. It’s a Hobson’s choice for Fitzgerald, after all, whether to have “the son,” husband, and analyst flirt with Mary North as the displaced mother or to have him become a drunken disreputable nurse who grudgingly cedes all power to women before vanishing into America. Neither strategy will sustain the sentimental and romantic male melodrama of Dick’s leave-­taking, yet both are a powerful part of that closure in the novel. Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald or Sarah Gamp? Sarah Gamp or Florence Nightingale? Rosemary Hoyt or ­Nicole Warren? In any case it is always two mothers, nurses, or lovers, who surround, need, and plague Dick Diver and F. Scott Fitzgerald in their sentimental imaginary.1

Who Sarah Gamp Is Within the outline of Sarah Gamp’s adopted persona, Dick Diver’s “workplace” role as nurse-­analyst-­minister can be divined. She is a contradiction from a society in which women could only be “fallen” or embody the virtues culturally ascribed to Victorian domestic angels, of which she is a parody as an unfeeling hireling. Gamp is an odd model of a free laboring woman outside the family; she “hires out” a sympathy she does not proffer. Dick Diver is a Warren employee; he feels their underwriting keenly even in his exalted professional status. Traditionally, the Victorian nurse had a sexual role in handling babies, genitals, first sexual awakenings, and tactile sensations, yet she also monitored the body’s slow death. Tender’s deep imaginary draws on both in the death of the two Diver (Fitzgerald) baby sisters who are always present as absences in Dick’s (Fitzgerald’s) melancholy; the nurse is finally the most valid fig­ure attending them. Dickens’ Gamp perhaps signified several things in Fitzgerald’s conception. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Gamp is always being assigned to cases where she will watch over the almost expired, the dying patients who give her less work to do as she “settles in.” Gamp is not only “half in love with easeful Death” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 51), she is also its hilarious and pragmatic aesthetic critic. Sitting with a semiconscious, delirious patient “as a connoisseur might gaze upon a doubtful work of art . . . she pinned his wandering arms against his sides to see how he would look if laid out as a dead man,”

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before settling finally, asking a chambermaid for pickled salmon, cheese, and gin to fortify her for a long night’s “work” (442). Fitzgerald appears to have rewritten passages from Martin Chuzzlewit into Tender. Dick is described in a “characteristic mood” realizing the emotional “waste and extravagance” of his parties; he “looked back at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust” (27, emphasis mine). The lines perhaps could reference Gamp’s aggressive rearrangement of bodies into corpse-­like positions and her martial giving of orders and non-­sentimental assumption of command in the patient’s sick room and household.2 Dick’s most consistent nursing role in ministering to ­Nicole is in the constant monitoring of her sense of reality in the long days and nights. After the scene involving the bloody sheets with Rosemary, “all night in Paris he had held her [­Nicole] in his arms while she slept under the luminol; in the early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form with words of tenderness and protection” (166). Dick thus being “tender” in the night is his primary role, almost asexually. Sarah Gamp swills down the gin while her patients implore her not to drink so much (MC 445). She makes Jonas Chuzzlewit sleep on a mattress on the floor of his sitting room, “his own chamber having been assigned to Mrs. Gamp” (346), and she sarcastically plays along with his hallucinations and then falls asleep again. When another of Mrs. Gamp’s patients is delirious “as though invisible companions were about his bed” (445), she eagerly enters into his fantasy with weird badinage or commands him to hold his tongue. She herself is a walking schizophrenic with an imaginary friend, Mrs. Harris, whom she invokes at moments of stress and who always gives a sec­ond-­hand testimonial to Gamp as a paragon of nursing and womanhood to increasingly dubious audiences. If Dick Diver is hyper-­aware of how his personality is constructed by how others view him, Mrs. Gamp is in her own mind complete only through the benign view of Mrs. Harris. Dickens’ brilliant physical description reinforces her role as a walking schizophrenic, as “she produced a watchman’s coat, which she tied round her neck by the sleeves, so that she became two people and looked, behind, as if she were in the act of being embraced” (444). Steven Marcus speaks of Gamp as a performer who diverts acquaintances from judging her, who herself has a novelist’s imagination and practices a “schizophrenia of election” (261). Gamp herself is a parody of the sentimental heroine, falsely proclaiming, “I feels the sufferins of other people more than my own.” She makes prescient remarks about the subconscious and analy­sis such as “we never knows wot’s hidden in each other hearts” and “talk when you’re wrong in your head and when you’re in your sleep, of certain things and you’ll be heavy in your mind” (Dickens 495–96). Dickens’ cheerful, powerful drunken woman, dominating “care” in the sick

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rooms of the wealthy, must have appealed to a self-­pitying streak in Fitzgerald as he imagined the cracks in Dick Diver’s role, what he had truly become as nurse on a “big case” for the Warrens. Sarah Gamp may be on view through­out Books Two and Three of Tender when Dick is in nursing mode. Walter Benn Michaels offers a clue to what Fitzgerald might have intuited in the economy of this character formation. Michaels references Foucault’s “dispensing with the constituent subject,” which Michaels posits thusly: “the desire to personify [an economy] is the desire to bridge the gap between our actions and the consequences of our actions by imagining a person who does not do what we do but who does do what what we do does” (179). The inscription in Gatsby of the “gold-­hatted, high-­bouncing lover” who purposefully dons his garb and bounces high until the woman names and must have him exemplifies the role equivalent to the desiring imagination’s identification. Fitzgerald’s wished-­for dream is when he can merge performance and object desire for the performing subject based on the subject’s function and emotional affect. Mrs. Harris functions as the imaginary moral side of Mrs. Gamp while Mrs. Gamp functions as the drunken female nursing side of Dick Diver, what he retains after a decade of life with ­Nicole and the Warren money. “Nursing” is how Dick functions in the economy of Tender, a hireling who, for a brief time, all must “have,” in­clud­ing patients, lovers, and friends. Dick Diver is not so much an analyst as he is on call to attend to many sicknesses of the body and spirit. Such would be in keeping with the outlines of domestic nursing in the nineteenth century when a nurse might have a large degree of autonomy and be in direct competition with doctors for fees from rich and poor alike (Metz 269). Since few cures were available, the goal was “patient management.” Nurses and midwives came to live with the patients for a “lying in or a laying out,” where Mrs. Gamp was “equally at home” (Martin Chuzzlewit 339–40). Berman in The Talking Cure states that Fitzgerald in Tender “regards the clinical side of psychiatry as barely above nursing,” and that Dick is a writer who is “indifferent to psychiatry” and “invests all his energy and time into authorship” (68). To comb Tender for nurses and nursing situations is to find a host of leads that suggest that for Fitzgerald, the role of nurse was a powerful female self-­image in the novel in response to his own felt maternal absences, the spectral two sisters, and ­Zelda’s on-­going condition. Exasperated, he writes Dr. Adolf Meyer in April 1933, “All I ever meant by asking authority over [­Zelda] was the power of an ordinary nurse in any continental country over a child; to be able to say ‘if you don’t do this I shall punish you’” (A Life in Letters 229); it’s grim to see him reducing his marriage to this role of a nurse tattling on a bad child. A sad hypothetical letter that Scott considers sending to ­Zelda “after 1932” is an eleven-­page interroga­ tory draft that seems equally directed to himself. At the outset, he writes:



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Do you feel that you are now able to be your own doctor—to judge what is good for you? If no—do you know what should be done? Should you be in a clinic do you think? Would a trained nurse help? An experienced one? An inexperienced one? If you were really not yourself and in a fit of temper or depression would you ask the judgment of such a woman or would you come to me? (A Life in Letters, 223)

Scott appears to have felt as reduced in Z ­ elda’s confidence as the newest hireling on a case, even as he in effect wrote to himself, much as Gamp spoke to Mrs. Harris, to ask what should be done. At other junctures, Scott stiffened Dick’s resolve through what sounds like a writer’s declaration. In further deleted lines accompany­ing the Gamp passage, Dick tells Mary North in their last interview, “I’m going back to work again. I’ve known most of the celebrated people of my time and despised the majority, made up a material paradise and parked my bottom in it” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 610). The lines suggest Mrs. Gamp settling in among the wealthy and making up her bed extemporaneously from two easy chairs (Martin Chuzzlewit 443); the lines are also redolent of Dick/ Fitzgerald, perhaps picking up his “practice”—his own manuscripts, in­clud­ing those of Tender Is the Night. When Mary North asks why he hasn’t already gone back to work, Dick replies, “You see, I was hired on a big case” (611). When ­Nicole tries to drive the car off the road after the Agiri Fair, Dick “could only take the characteristically modern course, to interpose—he would get a nurse from Zurich, to take her over tonight” (190–91). The Freudian doctor’s skill is exhausted, his sentiments meager and decanted from professional judgment. When the Eczema Woman succumbs in her suffering, it’s after the “three nights he had remained with the scabbed anonymous woman patient he had come to love, formally to portion out the adrenalin but really to throw as much wan light as he could into the darkness ahead” (242). Here the nursing function combines with the doctor’s “portioning” of her remaining life and the minister’s preparing the soul for death. Finally, when Dick is beaten severely by the crowd in Rome, Baby “waited with him until a woman could arrive from the English nursing home” (235)—a Nightingale or Gamp perhaps, with Dick now an “English” patient. Baby in this scene terrifies an effeminate Ameri­can vice-­consul and gets her own way with the bluster and verbal energy of a Sarah Gamp morphed into an heiress, possessor of a “clean-­sweeping irrational temper” that had made a “nursery of a continent” (232).

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Mrs. Elsie Speers, Rosemary’s mother, is the only “Mrs.” continually referred to in the novel, as Sarah Gamp is always “Mrs.” Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs. Speers “was fresh in appearance but she was tired; death beds make people tired indeed and she had watched beside a couple” (25); twice widowed, “her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened” (12).3 Mrs. Gamp, too, is a “widower” of twenty years, separated from her husband because of drink. She muses about the dead who had been under her care, “but it’s what we all must come to. It’s as certain as being born” (Martin Chuzzlewit 340). In correspondence, Mrs. Speers could view the “shuffle of love and pain . . . with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch” (Tender 163). Rosemary continually looks to equate Dick with her mother, and he of­ten replaces Mrs. Speers in her eyes. Other incidental citations of nurses and nursing appear in Tender’s pages. Dick at the outset fusses over Rosemary on the beach and worries about her “burning”; he later wants to sweep away their relationship from its “nursery footing” (84). ­Nicole’s flirtatious and ominous letters to Captain Diver include the moment she was walking on Michigan Boulevard in Chicago for miles: “Finally they pulled me in and there were nurses” (122). Dohmler warns Dick that he’ll devote half his life to ­Nicole being doctor and nurse (140). When Dick is trying to fend off an infatuated teenaged ­Nicole, he tells her, “Once I knew a man who fell in love with his nurse.” ­Nicole answers in perfect slang, “Bull!” (154). Nurses and nursing roles are of­ten implied dramatically in Tender even when not named as such. At several junctures in the novel, the “touch” of another per­ son proffered in sympathy or aid is immediately rebuffed. Tender is studded with such scenes of sentimental extension, and they are always inflected by markers of gender and culture, of­ten with class and racial overtones. In the Diver Manuscripts, Dick is “born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers washing him” (First Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 440), a fact displaced to ­Nicole in the published text as “born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers dressing her” (Tender 240). In another cut line, ­Nicole asks under duress, “I think I might have to ask for a decent nurse. If I could get word to my husband” (First Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 526–27); this would have appeared on page 161 of the published novel. In a stream-­of-­consciousness travelogue discussing the Divers’ North Africa trip, ­Nicole exclaims, “they tell me my baby [Topsy] is black” (161). Similar race and class issues are central within Tender’s representation of women. Kaethe Gregorovius resents ­Nicole treating her as a menial, a servant, “as if I smelt bad!” (240); ­Nicole’s hairdresser “in her white uniform, faintly sweating lipstick and cologne reminded [­Nicole] of many nurses” (307), further associating nurses, femininity, and sweat. Feminine odors and touches displace Devereux Warren’s hands on ­Nicole but cause the same repulsion. Furthermore, they also mark the nurse as a lower caste. Anne McClintock has firmly linked the evolution of Freudian theory

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to its suppression of classed female fig­ures; she argues that when Freud “wrote” femininity, he “erased the nurse’s agency” in the sexual development of the male and called it a “common phantasy” (85–87).4 That Fitzgerald took on, however briefly, Gamp’s persona as hireling in umbrage and then erased her from the published text underscores the repression/suppression of the nurse, what McClintock calls Freud’s cleansing of class contamination and money from his master narrative (93). By eliding the Gamp reference, Fitzgerald lavishes more pity on Dick as the spoiled priest blessing the beach. Katherine Cummings contends that Freud’s theory of seduction involves mediation and defense, with events from one narrative “transferred into another’s history within another scene by a sec­ond story teller” (151–52). At Dick’s most desperate moment after his beating in Rome, the crowd mistakes him for the suspect in the murder of a young child. Dick cries, “I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-­year old girl. Maybe I did” (235). Critics make much of this statement, wishing to implicate Dick (and Fitzgerald) in an abusive patriarchy. However, if we countenance the Sarah Gamp lines in the Diver Manuscript and allow Dick to say, in effect, “I want to tell you how I became a drunken powerful nurse. Maybe I was,” Dick may finally be telling the reader a significant truth about his role; he offers a summary hypothesis about women and power delivered from a specific subject position that mimes that of Devereux Warren. Fitzgerald deflects the role of father-­abuser-­doctor to mother-­caretaker-­nurse, from the elite powerful paternal to comically disreputable maternal, and creates a sentimental masking for the reader. “How many women is power” in Tender? Their number is many: ­Nicole, Rosemary, Mary North, Baby Warren, Mrs. Speers, the Eczema Woman, and Lady Caroline. To this list we may also add Dick Diver as Sarah Gamp, joining rather than opposing them, admiring the force he believes has defeated him at last. However, Fitzgerald chose finally not to expose Dick through this ultimate insight and wanted him to retain shards of the masculine identity as the priest blessing “his” beach.

How Sarah Gamp Functions How the Gamp fig­ure provides closure for Tender, one that may remain as a felt trace, can be conceptualized through Fitzgerald’s transition of Dick Diver from a melancholic to a mourning state. Dick Diver moves from the need to “nurse” and save ­Nicole to accepting the termination of his marriage and analytic vocation. To articulate through Gamp in the drafts and then to excise Gamp from the text is a double renunciation of the female identity that writes Dick’s true objectives, the need to be his mother and to save the sisters. Early in Tender, ­Nicole guesses that one of Dick’s “most characteristic moods” has come upon him, “the

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excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by his own form of melancholy which he never displayed but at which she guessed” (27); here is a hint of the Gamp confession/suppression, something felt but not “displayed.” Lukacher in Primal Scenes describes the “interpretive impasse” that melancholy engenders in which “one text is dependent on another” (24). He references Martin Chuzzlewit, Jonas Chuzzlewit’s crime of parricide, and the idea of the “incorporated other” that Mrs. Harris becomes for “schizophrenic” Sairy Gamp (306–07). Lukacher concludes on Freud’s “unconscious use of Dickens and about Dickens’ influence upon the most fundamental aspects of Freud’s thinking,” stressing that the primal scene “has the virtue of enabling us to respond to what . . . is an unreadable and unanalyzable situation” (330–31). I deem Fitzgerald’s repeated staging of the saving of the two sisters as his primal and sentimental crisis and that Sarah Gamp allows him one more powerful mask from which to speak “Dick Diver” and his discontents. Speaking through Gamp near Tender’s closure is akin to a child being asked to articulate trauma to a theorist by acting out a play between dolls or puppets. Dick’s speech-­as-­Gamp also allows him to closet shame or embarrassment as in a child’s response to being caught in a transgression. “Don’t see me anymore” is what Dick in effect says as Gamp in his brief transvestiture. Žižek references the film comedian Jerry Lewis who, when exposed as an idiot with everyone looking at him, “ridiculously distort[s] his facial expression, combined with twisting his hands and rolling his eyes.” Žižek thus posits the “ashamed subject” trying to “efface his presence” (On Belief 62–63), literally “losing face.” When Rosemary proudly announces that she has arranged a screen test for Dick, he is appalled and “his face move[s] first in an Irish way,” perhaps the grimace of humiliation in an “outing”; Dick explains about actors: “the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged” (Tender 70). Gamp drinks and eats to satisfaction while the bodies which decay on the sickbed are perhaps the counterparts to the Eczema Woman whose dialogue is her “final message.” She fashions an impotent and bitter query: “I am here a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was.” The insistence on a voice becoming a mask becomes relevant to the Gamp imposture as well as a trace of the nightingale within the Eczema Woman’s words. Dick finds her voice “rich, deep, and thrilling” (184), as Fitzgerald crafts an identification with “women as power” only in a degraded state of pain that carries an erotic charge. Fitzgerald throws Dick’s voice into Gamp as nurse in order to state that within the discursive formation, he both regulates (he has patients and defines what is “normal” in and for them) and is constrained (he is bought by the Warrens and is in thrall to his created role for them). Thus Dick in a sense pays tribute through Gamp when he enacts what he names. To proclaim that he has been on a “big

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case,” one where he has “parked his bottom,” is to call up the rotund Mrs. Gamp but also to uncomfortably suggest anal penetration, an economic buggery for the male. Gamp’s appearance and disappearance recreate that of Royal Dum­phry in his reappearance in Lausanne. She is abjected like Dum­phry, Francisco, and Devereux Warren and quickly silenced. One of Judith Butler’s favorite terms is catachresis, the fig­ure “that functions improperly as an improper transfer of sense.” Catachresis in the fig­ure of Mrs. Gamp could indeed function as Butler describes, “the use of a proper name to describe that which does not properly belong to it, and that returns to haunt and co-­opt the very language from which the feminine is excluded” (Bodies That Matter 37, emphasis mine). As Dick takes his leave, he channels the voice of the nurse fig­ure that has haunted and co-­opted the male psychiatrist from the outset. Fitzgerald exaggerates what is already a caricature in Gamp, transgendering her nursing burlesque to specifically limn his male psychia­ trist as a drunken female hireling who nonetheless can critique the class he has served. When Fitzgerald inscribes Dick as a nurse, he may be referencing “Dick-­ ens” directly. Certainly naming “Dick Diver” is to saddle a romantic hero with the worst sort of sexual pun for a name, a fact that critics have in general shied away from over the decades, not wanting to attempt an integration of the vulgar with the beautiful, although such is in the very marrow of Fitzgerald’s novels. Yet that ribald naming of “Dick Diver” hints always already at a Gamp-­like burlesque; Dick’s self-­naming as Gamp further skews him in his positioning as hero.5 Butler cites Plato calling the “receiving” principle a nurse and the “­ universal ­nature which receives all bodies” and thus believes he saw “woman’s proper function is to receive, take, welcome and include” (40). Plato’s receptacle “is not simply a fig­ure for the excluded but taken as a fig­ure, stands for the excluded, and thus performs or enacts another set of exclusions” (Butler 42). Fitzgerald might in Tender be amending the concept thusly: “I don’t want to be the woman or the nurse. I only want the power and knowledge that I can have through the absorption.” For Fitzgerald, the question always appears to be the following: how to be the receptacle (chora) and to remain masculine, perhaps as the “priest” who is a male “universal” receiving principle as in “suffer all to come onto me.” Fitzgerald has Dick sentimentally mime empathy and compassion in a classic attempt to absorb while not ingesting the thing itself, attempting to remain elsewhere but inevitably realigned with the symbolic. It is probable that Gamp emerges as Dick passes a judgment on self and society that speaks to every Diver gendered and professional crisis through­out the novel (21, 100–01, 112, 183–85, 245–52, 313–15). Gamp’s “usurpation” of Dick’s last speech and then her excision from the Diver Manuscripts reflects Fitzgerald’s firm maxim about “absorption” and “leaving out.” He didn’t want the Q ueen Moon and starry fays from Keats or the character from Dickens: he wanted to brief them, absorb them, and become a (male) dis-

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tillation of them. Fitzgerald’s final goal for all his characterizations is equivalency with self, imperial and complete. Already in Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens denies Gamp a traditional or radical feminine role; she is shapeless and non-­sexed, caring nothing for bodies under her care. Neither Gamp nor the Eczema Woman (in her “disfiguration”) is organically representational in any economy Fitzgerald could conceive. To transfer narrative power to Gamp for Dick’s last speech is what Butler—in speaking of the frame narrative voice of Jim Burden in Cather’s My Antonia—calls a “false transfer” (149). In Tender we could include Dick’s “taking on” the egos early loved in responsibility and power to the exclusion of his core self. If this is the “final” message from Sarah Gamp, how many others have there been? Dick has been fond of labeling himself, most of­ten in negatives: “I’m an old scientist all wrapped up in his private life” (70); “I guess I’m the Black Death” (219); “I want to give a speech about how I raped a five-­year-­old” (235). The ultimate labeling in the novel is always through a metamorphosis: Dick fitting into clothes “driven as an animal,” ­Nicole as the round belly of the continent, then a chassis designed for change with new wings and fins, and finally ­Nicole with Tommy as a new model of black and white, culminating in the “dying fall” motif as Dick leaves the beach for the last time. Dick always knows that the rich will show him his place if his manners “drop.” After a brief argument with a young Englishman in Baby’s entourage at a ski lodge, Dick thinks, “this is what I’ll get if I begin saying what I think” (178), presaging his own decline in Book Three. Gamp is “free” as a disreputable female, grotesque, non-­sentimental, without a family, and in an oblique sense free to judge the women and society in Tender like a fool or jester, which Fitzgerald could always “play.” Given that the associations around Mrs. Gamp come from the same impetus in Dickens, it’s perhaps not much of a leap for Fitzgerald to choose Gamp at all. Finally, the Gamp speech must be seen as central to Fitzgerald’s attempt to imagine desire around the lack that he has felt with the death of his two sisters and his complex usurpation of his mother’s role, which he also resented in many ways. Dick Diver is not consciously sure of what he has lost and neither is Fitzgerald. Readers of Tender cannot process what they have never known in the first place, but they may be affected by the aura surrounding the trace. The demand for form yields up a Gamp who is a defiant and deficient female “solution” to the male ego’s claims to be sentimental. Gamp momentarily relieves Dick’s need to be at the center of his experience as he leaves it; consider her as a shedding of a molted carapace that is broken and empty or in movie parlance, a latex disguise that is donned and then ripped off, a vulgar piece of Hollywood trickery. For Gamp to “carry the egos,” however briefly, becomes what Horowitz calls the ego’s need “to carry the burden of its own history” (124), which in Fitzgerald’s case would include race, class, and gender and the need to equate analy­sis with the unaccept-

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able nursing. “Gamp” marks the end of this dream and remains a powerful secret coordinate of Tender Is the Night, as Fitzgerald finally decided to condemn Dr. Diver to a more dignified banishment and anonymity.

Sarah Gamp and Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald In an argument about Dick Diver’s maternal appropriation, consider the fig­ure of Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald (1860–1936), Scott Fitzgerald’s mother, whom it is clear he kept at arm’s length as much as he could for most of his adult life while crafting popu­lar lore about her eccentricities. My thesis has been to ascribe real importance to the largely unwritten and perhaps unconscious structure of their relationship, with Scott as the son born to an inevitably depressed and anxious mother a few months after the deaths of his two baby sisters. Much evidence exists to propose that the fig­ure of Sarah Gamp in Tender had its counterpart in Mollie. Beginning with Turnbull’s biography of Fitzgerald, she has been described anecdotally as “a little goofy,” with an “odd” appearance, “sallow skin” that was “surprisingly” wrinkled with “dark discolorations beneath her pale eyes” and “fringing, cascading hair that was her by-­word.” She dressed, “as someone said, like the ark—everything drooped.” Mollie was “somewhat broad for her height” and “walked with a slight lurch.” St. Paul children made fun of her; she spoke in a “droll manner, dragging and drawling her word.” Turnbull finally offers faint sympathy, suggesting Mollie was kind and people were cruel, that Scott was embarrassed by her and she made him wince (27). Mizener added to the portrait by writing of her speech that “whatever came into her head came right out of her mouth,” that she would wear one new black shoe and one new brown shoe on the street and announce to the curious that they were new and she wanted to break them in one at a time, that she loved to read bad books and that she spoiled her son who blamed her for it (Far Side 2–3). Andre Levot later qualifies Mollie’s portrait, writing that Fitzgerald could not accept Mollie as she was, that he warned his Paris friends that she was a shrew, but that when the Murphys finally met Mollie in Paris in 1931 after Fitzgerald’s father’s death, “they were surprised to meet an elderly, small-­town woman, a little intimidated, dignified and placid in her mourning clothes” (14, 259).6 Yet in response to a question about his own mental health in 1926, Scott wrote to Perkins, “Why shouldn’t I go crazy? My father is a moron and my mother a neurotic, half-­insane with pathological nervous worry” (A Life in Letters 138). At Mollie’s death on Sep­tem­ber 2, 1936, Scott wrote, “she was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her” (Cline 360). He had also deeply implicated her in his fictional ethos in “An Author’s House” and the Cary sisters story (see Chapter 2); Cline fairly credits her for “Scott’s brains, vitality and of­

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ten out-­of-­place directness of speech” (52). Cline also related an anecdote that Mollie once alarmed a woman whose husband was dying by saying, “I’m trying to decide how you’ll look in mourning” (52). Here is an uncanny sec­onding of art in life as Dickens had Mrs. Gamp look at the dying “as a connoisseur might look upon a doubtful work of art”; she then pins the arms of the sick man to his sides as “her fingers itched to compose his limbs in that last marble attitude.” “Ah! . . . he’d make a lovely corpse,” she said (Martin Chuzzlewit 442). Harry Stone suggests a primal role for Gamp as nurse and proxy mother, eating and drinking while people die, neglecting and then feeding on them “like a ghoul” (Martin Chuzzlewit 347), and comments that Dickens had relished turning birth into death, “a lying in into a laying out” (215). A necessary congress existed between the births and deaths of the Fitzgerald children and the life cycle of Scott’s creative processes that deeply imprinted his imagination about his mother and influenced his anger and brooding about the feminine roles Dick is forced to play. Dickens’ Sarah Gamp would have provided a scrapbook of breathtakingly off-­ key anecdotes for Fitzgerald, and there’s reason to believe he cast his mother ­Mollie at least in part in Gamp’s mode. A suggestive scene in chapter 52 of Martin Chuzzlewit may have imprinted itself in Fitzgerald’s mind by uniting Gamp’s bizarre images in language to his putative two sister conception. An inebriated Mrs. Gamp addresses an assembled group just before she is carried out in a strategic faint after exposure as a heartless drunken fraud. Feeling ignored, she breaks into Sweedle­ pipe’s oration to tell Mr. Chuzzlewit about “Mrs. Harris as has one sweet infant (though she do not wish it known) in her own family by the mother’s side kep’ in a bottle; and that sweet babe she see at Greenwich Fair, a-­travelling in company with the pink-­eyed lady, Prooshan dwarf, and livin’ skelinton . . . she was showed her own dear sister’s child, the same not bein’ expected from the outside picter, where it was painted quite contrairy in a livin’ state a many sizes larger, and performing beautiful upon the Arp, which never did that dear child know or do, since breathe it never did, to speak on in this wale!” (856). This grotesque riffing about preserved fetuses and a dead daughter whose portrait is larger than she ever grew in life is delivered in Gamp’s false sentimental narration about her imaginary friend’s imaginary dead children; it could certainly have permeated Fitzgerald’s absorbing consciousness. Two revealing passages suggest Fitzgerald’s powerful affinity for and disapproval of the old woman as character/narrative agent. Frances Kerr cites Fitzgerald’s feeling “half feminine” in relation to what she deems “the politics of emotion” in Gatsby. Fitzgerald in 1921 referred to bad writing as “that slatternly thing, a written-­down mental excretion” and Frances Kerr goes on to link that statement to the modernist avant-­garde, which “chose female images of disease, fat, ignorance, laziness, or sentimentality to signify a lack of either emotional or intellectual vigor” (Kerr 405). Most devastating in self-­disgust is the un-

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dated Notebook entry in which Fitzgerald states, “My mind is the loose cunt of a whore to fit all genitals” (Forter 145). The explicitness of these remarks—­allying popu­lar writing for the marketplace with old whoring—is a harsher restatement of Fitzgerald’s recurring quarrel with the popu­lar in Tender. Considerable self-­ abuse can be intuited in Gamp as narrative agent for Dick’s final speech in the Diver Manuscripts. Along with all the narrative reasons—Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald imagined as Victorian eccentric, the Nightingale-­Florence Nightingale nurse imagery, and the affinity with Dickens as a sentimentalist—Gamp is a cry from the heart of popu­lar narrative within Fitzgerald’s masochistic casting of his hero as an old female nurse who can pronounce women as power. Dick Diver has lost the ability to speak the truth to anyone, admitting, “if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them” (Tender 178). For Fitzgerald, Gamp is a familiar image, however provisionally, to pass before “the harlot’s mind,” and she is the harlot’s mind. To take on Sairey Gamp’s persona was to provide him with a bitter capstone for Dick Diver’s frustrating passage as son and maternal caregiver. The Fitzgerald sisters’ dolls “unwrapped” from tissue paper symbolically included Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald and Sairey Gamp, for Scott himself “couldn’t bear to throw out anything” (Turnbull 281).

“How Many Women is Power”: The Gold Standard This chapter so far has discussed Sarah Gamp’s agency and subjectivity, the masks behind her delivery, and the disappearance of the material from the published text. At this point, I want to shift to an analy­sis of what Gamp actually says. The United States unilaterally announced it was going off the gold standard on April 19, 1933, breaking the implicit contract between government and pub­lic that all government bonds and paper bills were ultimately redeemable in gold. At that time in the history of the Tender Is the Night manuscripts, Fitzgerald was still retaining the significant line, “Women are the real gold standard.” Fitzgerald, too, finally went off the gold standard, driving Mrs. Gamp and Dick’s final estimate of women’ power and currency underground, where the charge and appraisal are latent. Without “the women,” Dick’s value is “paper thin” or “on paper” unless he is defined by the “gold” embodied by women. The Mrs. Gamp who stated piously “I feel the sufferins of other people more than I feels my own” (495), and who self-­promotes, “Snap [me] up at any price for Mrs. Gamp is worth her weight and more in goldian [sic] guineas” (436), is the double to sentimental “bought” Dick Diver. Tender makes many overt and covert statements about gold and value, which

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have been linked subjects through­out the ages. Gold as a natural resource possesses a lovely yellow color and soft glow, a heaviness and malleable quality, a rare and distinctive beauty that make it almost universally desirable visually and tactilely. As art, gold has been shaped into jewelry and all manner of personal adornment and decoration, of­ten becoming the very symbol of a combined wealth, power, and beauty. Gold has been millennially fascinating to countless civilizations, long before its prosaic imprisonment as equivalency value in gold bars in sites such as Fort Knox, Kentucky. In the United States, the battle between using gold- or silver-­backed currency escalated with the coinage act of 1873 when the federal government abandoned the bimetallic standard that existed from 1792 to 1862 and stated that the government was not required to buy silver for conversion to dollars. This was generally interpreted as a way for the North­east to concentrate wealth in finance capitalism. Gold standard advocates then supported as natural gold’s intrinsic value and extended it to money, which in this logic would then be “exchangeable” only in gold itself (Hoeller 761ff ). Michaels finds it striking that money could be identified as a natural resource and chronicles the shifting value and aesthetics of equating money with its physical form (146–47) and ­Nicole’s body as the vehicle of Ameri­can capitalism is a primary example.7 Fitzgerald is obviously the poster-­writer for such equivalencies; most readers are aware of “golden girl” Daisy Buchanan’s voice in Gatsby, which sounds like money. ­Nicole and other women in Tender are also firm examples. “How Many Women Is Power” applied to ­Nicole begins with all the trains in America running for her. Rosemary is the “standard” for Hollywood purity and initially believes the Divers set the gold standard for something prosaic as “swimming” and for “giv[ing] all the transitions their full value” (21). Baby Warren is the banker and investor for the two Warren sisters. Mary North and Lady Caroline have free­dom because they are women underwritten by their fortunes. Women as money buy Dick as a nurse, nurturer, and husband. Finally, Dick as a currency himself disappears from circulation.8 Women don’t necessarily look like “gold” to Dick Diver or to Fitzgerald; rather they have reference to the “gold standard,” a whole series of equivalences across society’s sense of value that has class biases and power implications. Women for Fitzgerald represent the power of the gold standard and regulate the terms and power of value, purchases, and exchanges, even as they embody that power themselves. Chandler writes of a “theatrical screening” that adds to “a complex relay structure of subject positions” in “the structure of a sentimental network” (69). The huge conceit of ­Nicole Warren Diver as Ameri­can national body (Tender 55) structures and is the very fulcrum of a sentimental network which is based on the desire for ­Nicole herself. Fitzgerald encapsulates his major thematic statement about ­Nicole within her status as a surrealist imago of West­ern desire and

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commodification, in the erotics of materialism that sentiment regulates. ­Nicole’s body is both instrument and gold setting as well, traversed by trains, tractors, factories, vats, hogsheads, and link belts. The jewels “lining her” are toothpaste, mouthwash, canned tomatoes, and coffee. ­Nicole is a currency “made” by these things, even as she “sells” them.” The conceit of “­Nicole as national body” showed Fitzgerald at the top of his sentimental subject-­object relations study, referencing the power of women in shaping the Ameri­can product and its consumption through an industrial capitalism re-­imagined as a vicious, vulgar immensity a key modern mise en abyme. “Women are the real gold standard” may presume ancillary exchanges that proffer a false value. Sarah Gamp has to repeatedly define her own value through the valuation of the imaginary Mrs. Harris since she has neither money nor gold nor a husband. When we desire representations of natural things, we desire a sentimental sec­ond-order economy of their powerful affect, which is something like sympathy in the lifeworld or identification in the reading of fiction. Gold is the resource most of­ten seen through beauty’s articulation, and Fitzgerald never stints on the versatility of its representation. Albert McKisco is a novelist who can garner an audience for “many readers were stunned by the ease with which they could follow him.” His writing ultimately “sof­t ens” and “debases” (Tender 205) what he writes, and the reader is “charmed,” as Fitzgerald links a cultural corruption to readerly pleasure. “Hard” gold always already has within itself its own instability, its softness, the fundamental contradiction and power of its ability to lure and fascinate. Nowlin writes of Tender’s barely concealed masculine anxieties “against a pub­lic sphere enchanted by popu­lar culture—and a new breed of women, a spectacular feminine performer, empowered by it” (98), lines that gloss over “Fitzgerald as Gamp.” For Fitzgerald, to work in ­Nicole is always to work “in gold”: “her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes. Her once fair hair had darkened, but she was lovelier now than she had been at eighteen, when her hair was brighter than she” (25). Such description buttresses the “gold standard” readings of The Great Gatsby which have for decades centered on its symbol patterns, from Daisy Buchanan as the Golden Girl, Gatsby’s gold car, the green-­gold color system, and the gold-­hatted high-­bouncing lover of the novel’s inscription. Tender yields more hidden veins of ore to mine. Identifying “power” in Tender with the physical form of women suggests not only that they are money and possess money (the Warren fortune, Rosemary as a “bankable” star, America “tithing” to ­Nicole, Mary North marrying “rich”), but also that women are what they “purchase” in a broad sense (Dick and the clinic, his caregiving and husbanding), which becomes part of their “gold,” their commodity accumulations. As Baby coldly determines after Dick’s arrest in Rome, Dick’s “use value” is dropping fast; he will ultimately disappear

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from “circulation” as a currency, falling like a stock in Books Two and Three of Tender. Doctor Diver is paid in women—a parade of patients, his wife-­as-­patient, star­lets, party guests, and the ubiquitous “girl”—anyone for whom he performs and charms. He is conflicted about payment: “watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature,” yet “he had been swallowed up like a gigolo and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-­deposit vaults” (201). In Switzerland when Franz suggests Dick buy the clinic, he tells him it’s a “gold mine” and “from the yellow glint in Baby’s eyes, Dick saw she was listening” (174). The gold of Warren money is not the only vein mined by Fitzgerald in Tender. The Swiss tableau of Franz and Dick’s dialogue is that of an old-­fashioned “tap-­room . . . of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers” where they “pretended that the world was all put together again by the gray-­haired men of the golden nineties” (174). It’s within this nostalgia that scenes are “golden,” in time past wrenched into “gold” (Warren money) in time present. Finally a fittingly comic addendum to the gold standard in Tender might be the insistent Ameri­can of “sinister aspect” in France, vending the Herald and Times (“fresh from New York”), who entreats Dick and brings a grey news clipping from his “purse” in which “cartooned millions of Ameri­cans pouring from liners with bags of gold”; the vendor asks, “you think I’m not going to get part of that?” (309). He interrupts Dick and Tommy in their final argument over the “gold” that is ­Nicole. Sarah Gamp stubbornly equates herself with value in gold (Martin Chuzzlewit 436); another “reference” comes from Mr. Chuffey’s friends, whom Gamp imagines to say, “Sairey, you are gold as has passed the furnage [sic]” (796). When Dick proclaims women are the gold standard, he’s being derisive and admiring at the same time, sentimentally identifying with what he became and what dragged him down.9 Fitzgerald is provisionally delighted one last time to charm us as readers with Dickens and Gamp. Both self-­contempt and self-­aggrandizement are a narcissism once removed from incest, as Dick’s last speech is in self-­performance, for ­Nicole has found him in the “phase of his own story spinning out inside him” (300), as he told her, “trying to save [him]self ” (301). Dick is becoming Mrs. Gamp as Gamp became Mrs. Harris allowing Gamp to praise herself and give opinions—the only way she can give herself any credit. Sedgwick identifies Nietzsche’s “will to power of pity” in which he as “the privileged analyst” is capable of “overlapping” sentimentality with ressentimentality, a “compost” of sorts that “represents modern emotion itself ” in Nietzsche’s thought as “vicariousness and misrepresentation, but also as sensation brought to the quick with an insulting closeness” (Epistemology 150). Here is a fine description of the dynamics of some of Tender’s most sentimental scenes: ­Nicole and the gender-­effacing bath-

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ing trunks, the Diver party, the screening of Daddy’s Girl, Dick’s screening the Victorian century at the World War I battlefield, the bloody sheets exchanged in Paris, ­Nicole’s face “coming up close” at the center of the West­ern world, the desperate questions of the Eczema woman to her psychiatrist-­nurse, Dum­phry accosting Dick with compliments, and Devereux Warren. Dr. Diver gets to lecture the Eczema Woman in the manner in which Mrs. Gamp counters and mimes the cries and last words of her dying patients. Dick goes through a litany of bromides in answering the Eczema Woman’s pain and distress over her suffering and battles with men. One suspects Fitzgerald is somewhat channeling Gamp in this scene; he has a suffering Z ­ elda manqué right where Dick can lecture her as patient and extend a stage sympathy. A sensation of “insulting closeness” is the signature of Sarah Gamp, the scandal of her fleshy, consuming body comfortable before death and dying, her performance of schizophrenia that Dick both embodies and treats—uncomfortably that of ­Nicole and ­Zelda as well. Dick Diver “viciously” sentimentalizes himself in resentiment. What began in the Melarky Manuscripts as a projected matricide concludes with the death of the Eczema Woman, the death of the Diver-­Warren marriage, and ultimately, the Diver Manuscript “death” of Dick as Gamp.10 The matricide plot turns voluntarily suicidal as the novel’s protagonist takes his leave: nothing is more abjectly sentimental than the vicarious participation in the author’s sorrow of “when I’m gone.”11 Sedgwick describes the “freeze-­framing of a targeted embodiment of sentimentality whose presentation as spectacle to a further sentimentality whose invisibility preserved, re-­enabled by that highly differential act of staging” (222). Such a “target” is Dick Diver whose “invisibility” becomes most visible as he disappears into America. However, Sedgwick might also call up ­Nicole as the round belly of the continent, the totality of Ameri­can capitalism and her own bound suffering—a tour de force “freeze-­frame” indeed. We early on grasp the meaning of the Sarah Gamp speech about women, gold, and power. Gamp is the embodiment of sentiment; she is not sentimental but Dick’s statement is.12 Dick’s viewpoint of Sarah Gamp is Sarah Gamp’s viewpoint. The answer to “how many women is power,” is ­Nicole as the totality of all of them, then of­ten reduced to one in­di­vidual and finally inflated again to Tender’s many women: the “gold star muzzers,” plus Dick’s two young women at table (­Nicole and Rosemary), as well as Nightingale and Gamp with the aura of Dick and Fitzgerald’s two sisters pervading the ensemble. All are sentimentally absorbed into the protean Dr. Diver. It finally takes a non-­sentimental Victorian woman’s persona to identify the most resentful and admiring of male sentimental statements: it takes one to identify (as) (with) one. With the elimination of Gamp, Fitzgerald can make Dick seem more “whole-­

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souled” and even tragic to the reader and less a fig­ure of his own abject amusement. The gold standard presupposes an equivalent to currency of an unchanging value, but Dick is always volatile. As Clare Eby comments about Frank Norris’s McTeague—another character familiar with gold and greed—his “sense of personal identity crumbles along with his professional position [dentist]” (140); such is true for Dick as well.13 Gamp is always outside the major economies of Martin Chuzzlewit, living emotionally, and linguistically in a world of her own. What a “holiday” that would be for Dr. Diver! He tentatively moves toward it as he leaves the narrative gesturing to himself (300), full of interior laughter (314). After all, Fitzgerald pointedly selected Gamp—a pre-­professional free agent, almost a classic fool—so he could appropriate a wished-­for range of linguistic free­ dom and go beyond “women as power” to speak of women as power. Fitzgerald doesn’t cut Gamp’s speech because it’s not true but because it’s too true. Gamp’s speech is a way for Dick to say in a paraphrase of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black: “Gentlemen, I have not the honor to belong to your class.” It’s a switch and deflection, a class statement made in the guise of an appropriation of popu­ lar fiction. Fitzgerald ultimately did not want the reader to be left with the bitterness in Dick’s speech as Gamp. Such sarcasm would not send him gentle into the Ameri­can night. There was every reason for Fitzgerald to cut the Gamp reference and speech stylistically, but the excision does not finally lessen the curve of its symbolic resonance to divining the meaning of Dick Diver’s guilt and resentment. Gamp is something like a bay leaf in a recipe, an essence that enhances the flavor but is unpalatable and discarded when the dish is served—disposable as Gamp herself always is. For Fitzgerald, her function in Tender Is the Night follows the logic of her class and the form of her imagining.

Conclusion As Tender winds down, Fitzgerald becomes increasingly opaque in his desire to have Dick Diver protect his own psyche. ­Nicole spies him behind their beach cottage and watches him from afar on the day after she has first made love repeatedly with Tommy (294–98): Dick was “sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall, and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him, his own, not hers” (300). Dick’s story plays out for himself in silent analy­ sis; all his gestures are there, everything he has previously used to magically hold everyone in his orbit. In one of her only sentimental moments, ­Nicole puts her arm on his shoulder and says, “Don’t be sad,” whereupon Dick turns on her and

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states, “I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself ” (301). The scene is very moving; to a sentimental reader of Tender’s great love story it shows a diminishing into the male melodrama of Dick protecting himself. The naked admission perhaps parallels Scott to ­Zelda during the final drafting of Tender in 1933–34 as he guarded “his” narrative against “her” narrative: “his own, not hers.” Prior to the Gamp speech in the Diver Manuscript, when Dick switches off the light and he and Mary North are back in the Riviera sun, he says “I’m going back to work again. I’ve known most of the celebrated people of my time and despised the majority, made up a material paradise and parked my bottom in it, now I’m going back to work” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 611). Dick “swayingly” makes his papal cross blessing the beach and then delivers his Gamp speech. Waiters help him toward a cab while he is “still waving, blessing and consecrating the material paradise he had casually created for a certain group at a certain time as he explained to the waiters” (613). In the published Tender, Fitzgerald excises his own unpublished Gamp lines, whereas for Tender’s inscription, he had edited John Keats. Tender Is the Night ends on the beach where it began, reminding us of a time when Dick once sculpted the sand. If Fitzgerald dramatized Dick’s flight from Francisco and Dum­phry back to Devereux Warren and the paternal imaginary by cutting the Sarah Gamp speech, he performed another male resuscitation: better a priest’s blessing than a bitter speech from a drunken nurse.

9 Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy Sentiment, Sensation, and “Two Faces” Have been reading Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy together—chapter by chapter (this is serious) and am simply overwhelmed by the resemblance. The books are simply two faces of the same world spirit and only by putting them together do you get something as integral as, say Smoke or Moll Flanders. —Fitzgerald My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp—a cruel, ruthless woman, a drunkard, opportunist, unreliable, most of her character was bad, but least it was character, Mrs. Harris, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Q uixote, and Sancho, of course. Lady MacBeth I always admire. And Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio—both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with life, didn’t ask any favors, never whined. —William Faulkner interview I did not realize then that I was trying to manufacture the sister which I did not have and the daughter which I was to lose. —Faulkner, Preface to The Sound and the Fury

How Scott Fitzgerald might have conceived of the nineteenth century’s most famous Ameri­can sentimental boy hero, Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, alongside one of the early twentieth century’s most grotesque stunted villains, Faulkner’s Popeye in Sanctuary, takes the tale of the sentimental influences on Tender Is the Night in yet another direction, one that investigates Fitzgerald’s intimation of a popu­lar sentimental “classic” and its modernist subversion. In August 1932, Fitzgerald writes his “General Plan” for Tender Is the Night into his ledger. His notations about ­Nicole’s “case” include “must avoid Faulkner attitude and not end with a novelized Krafft-­Ebing.” In Sep­tem­ber 1932 in his letter to Cary Ross (see the first epigraph above), Fitzgerald regards the “world spirit” that the fictions attempt to grasp. When Fitzgerald muses about Dick’s “Achilles’ heels,” he conceives of an ambitious zeitgeist for Dick and America to represent, from the Vic-

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torians through South­ern cavaliers to Gold Star Mothers, expatriates, and tourists in post–World War I Europe. Dick possesses “the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation—the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely that there were no wolves outside the cabin door” (117). The much maligned trope of Ameri­ can exceptionalism could not find a better short-­form sentimental imagining of both its power and negation. To describe this “spirit,” Fitzgerald wrote through the changing faces of sentimentalism, reflecting its power and negation within his sensibility. When Fitzgerald writes about Faulkner’s and Burnett’s novels as being “two faces of the same world spirit,” he is most likely referencing the clash between sentiment and sensation in popu­lar fictional representation. Both the attraction to and repulsion by the Faulkner-­Burnett matrix are crucial for Fitzgerald. Sanctuary is the epitome of a popu­lar potboiler in many ways; Fitzgerald conflates it with Fauntleroy as well. With his own contradictory views on popu­larizing and America’s harlot’s mind, he is also forcefully sensing something like his own kinship to Faulkner in the creation of Sanctuary. He makes the grotesque underpinning to Tender a repeated pistol shot of the sensational without losing his tragic romance. Could Fitzgerald have absorbed Faulkner in his familiar pattern and then left him out? Sarah Gamp has a lack of sentiment and a verbal carapace that attracted both Fitzgerald and Faulkner, who is also taken with Gamp’s imaginary alter-­ego, Mrs. Harris, a “good nurse” who also gives Fitzgerald another nurse to ponder, “created” by a schizophrenic (­Nicole’s diagnosis). Finally, we encounter Faulkner speaking of Ophelia as a favorite character even as Fitzgerald writes, “Better Ophelia and her flowers”—climaxing an uncannily similar citation pattern for two great modern Ameri­can authors as they reflect on which literary fig­ ures move them. To return to Fitzgerald’s letter above, what is it in exemplary fictions by DeFoe and Turgenev that is “integral” for him? He may have hoped that Tender would unite pub­lic and private dimensions through channeling the spirit of the post–World War I age in social and cultural terms, while writing a sentimental-­ sensational love story of great beauty. Ivan Turgenev in Smoke (1867) wrote as a realist social critic looking back at his country through a cast of Russian upper class characters in Switzerland. The hero is in love with two women; the novel is divided between aristocratic reactionaries and a gentry with more radical views. Turgenev casts a cold eye on them while retaining the romance. In Moll Flanders (1722), Daniel DeFoe deeply understood Moll’s feminine psychology—she is a survivor. She could have been played more genteelly by Pickford or a Gish; alternatively a plucky girl like Rosemary Hoyt, shining through, might have played Moll in early maturity. Defoe is also a positive example for Fitzgerald of an early

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professional writer knowing the “harlot’s mind,” working for money. Faulkner’s criteria for memorable characters included those who picked themselves up and had no complaints or regrets. As Faulkner commented, “When I remember Moll Flanders and all her teeming and rich fecundity like a marketplace where all that had survived up to that time must bide and pass,” “I can wish I had written that book” (Backscheider 6, 17). Finally, Fitzgerald’s ambitions for the significant form of what would become Tender Is the Night were formidable, ones that transcended sources and models in a spirit also exemplified by Faulkner himself, among other literary modernists. Fitzgerald who is “overwhelmed by the resemblance” of Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy most likely reacted with distaste for Faulkner’s aberrant take on the degradation of the college boy and girl in Sanctuary: the writer of This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby saw his romantic fictional milieu in harsh exposure by an unimpressed writer of genius who held no brief for its verisimilitude or Fitzgerald’s fascination with the aura of that privileged world or his exhaustive record of the social and cultural materials from which it was made. Faulkner’s Temple Drake as a golden (college) girl is an empty flirt and Gowan Stevens is a combative drunken young snob. Professorial Horace Benbow is obsessed with a conflation of mother-­daughter-­lover-­wife in his psyche, which makes him his own pathologist in an abject portrayal that Fitzgerald could never have accepted for his Dick Diver. As always, Fitzgerald didn’t want the man, the author (Faulkner), or the novel (Sanctuary); he wanted to create according to his own mix of sentiment, realism, and romance.1 Finally, I believe it is highly probable that Fitzgerald grasped these “two faces” from Faulkner and Burnett as uncannily representative of his fictional construction of the sentimental form of imagined incest. This incest is fully displaced from mother-­son (Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald and Scott) to father-­daughter (Devereux Warren and ­Nicole) and beyond to Temple’s rape by a “child” Popeye who is the antithesis of Burnett’s little Cedric Errol while similar in his undersized youth. The “two faces” in Fitzgerald’s conception may “put together” an overlay, a “Dicole” configuration or mask rather than a Janus-­faced coin. The deep structure of Tender Is the Night and of Fitzgerald’s personal reimaginings with his mother, incest, and young girls would appear to be congruent with Faulkner’s fictional obsessive subjects, with the difference that Faulkner articulates them more woundingly and explicitly. A full study of these writers’ biographical influences and the resultant congruities in their fictions would be a significant project; the speculations here about Sanctuary and Tender Is the Night will be restricted in large part to the implications of Fitzgerald’s intimations about Burnett and Faulkner for his own novel-­in-­progress and how he may have inscribed these absorptions into his work.

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Mrs. Burnett and the “Vicious Tracts” When Mark Spilka in Hemingway’s Q uarrel with Androgyny (1990) identified the literary phenomenon of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) as a key document in the training and mindset of late Victorian Ameri­can mothers and their young sons, he posited a strong ambiguously gendered influence on the sentimental education of several generations of turn-­of-­the-­­century Ameri­can male children. Fauntleroy ultimately sold over one million copies and made Burnett over $100,000, qualifying it as one of the Victorian documents that Dick Diver at the World War I battlefield might have suggested “you had to remember” if you were to be a “whole-­souled sentimentalist.”2 Unlike young Ernest Hemingway, famously “twinned” and dressed with his sister Marcelline by his mother Grace, there was to be no alternative Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer persona for Fitzgerald and Dick Diver; it became for Fitzgerald rather sympathy given, withheld, or violently projected among male and female sentimental significations. Spilka makes a convincing case for the 1890s Ameri­ can mothers’ “genteel feminist desires” in which “they sought reciprocal treatment, courageous acknowledgement of participatory powers, and androgynous equality with their sons” (55). Most early twenty-­first century Ameri­cans, if they know anything at all of Mrs. Burnett’s doughty little boy, dimly know of his “sissy” clothes and hair, the impossible ruffled shirts and velvet suits. When Fitzgerald has Rosemary respond to the Divers’ ethereal and highly sentimental dinner party, he imagines her “as dewy with belief as a child from one of Mrs. Burnett’s vicious tracts” (34). The other prominent use of “vicious” in Tender comes at the conclusion of Rosemary’s screening of Daddy’s Girl when Dick appraises the final uniting of daughter and father “in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality” (69). Thus does Fitzgerald firmly implicate Mrs. Burnett in his most negative feelings about sentiment in Tender. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) had a fifty-­year career as an Ameri­ can popu­lar novelist; she wrote a best seller during every decade from the 1880s to the 1920s in a wide range of genres, from children’s books to adult popu­lar romances.3 In 1883 the Century magazine listed Burnett along with William Dean Howells, Henry James, James Branch Cabell, and Constance Fenimore Woolston as one of those “who hold the front rank today” in the “native element” in Ameri­ can fiction (Thwaite 86). For years Burnett tacked between adult and child and adolescent protagonists in her work, of­t en seemingly without differentiation. Accounts portray her as identifying with children all her life; even her own children recount thinking of her as another little girl. She loved to dress as Bo Peep with them and also collected dolls and doll clothes through­out her life (43, 85). Like Fitzgerald, she was relentlessly eager to please, intensely romantic, and taken with

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physical beauty; tiny Cedric is as magnetically attractive as are the girls in her stories and novels (39). In the early 1920s, Burnett’s estate in Plandome, Long Island, looked out across Manhasset Bay toward the Fitzgeralds’ more modest rented house in Great Neck Estates. Fitzgerald, unlike Gatsby, did not stretch his arms across the Bay toward the elderly Burnett’s “green light,” and she would not have been an A-­list invitee for one of Gatsby’s parties. However, the evidence suggested by Dick Diver’s obsessive desire to please and to soothe the women around him could have been richly colored by Mrs. Burnett’s young boy, as Fitzgerald wryly cited his paired readings of Burnett and Faulkner’s Sanctuary during the full flowering of the Tender manuscripts. Young Cedric Errol (his father’s surname) is instinctively loving, attentive, and understanding of adult needs and anxieties. He sof­tens hearts and quickens feminine pulses; on the other hand, he is certainly a prototype filtered down the decades for Shirley Temple’s preternaturally sympathetic persona in film after film from 1928–40, during which she solved more adult emotional problems than would Lassie or Rin-Tin-­Tin. Cedric’s elder sister double is Sara Crewe from Burnett’s The Little Princess (1905), an expansion of an 1888 Burnett serial and one written coextensively with Fauntleroy and more overtly a model for a film like Daddy’s Girl. Cedric and Sara comfort and sustain their bereft mommies and daddies in these texts, but for Fitzgerald such characters ultimately lead to Rosemary and always, inexorably (“viciously”), to ­Nicole. In the initial handwritten manuscript of 1932, which features Rosemary’s narration of the Diver dinner party scene, Fitzgerald began by writing “Rosemary, as dewy with sentiment as a child in Dickens” but then crossed out “sentiment” and replaced it with “belief ” and then moved to strike “Dickens,” replacing it with “one of Mrs. Burnett’s vicious tracts” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 116). Fitzgerald had written in an earlier draft that “the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of loving kindness” before replacing “loving kindness” with “sentiment” (Second Version, Me­larky Manuscript 64, emphasis mine). Fitzgerald appears to have moved in the drafts from an endorsement of Dickens’ brand of sentiment (male, perhaps “whole-­ souled” or “rare”) to what he associated with Mrs. Burnett, the more dreaded female “sentimental-­ity” of Rosemary’s film and the “father complex.”4 The elegant emotional description of the dinner party seems to wrest the passage away from the gaze of a Mrs. Burnett character into a “rarer atmosphere.” As in ­Fitzgerald’s striking of Sarah Gamp from Tender’s conclusion, a canceling of “Dickens” haunts the text’s aura, with Dickens as the classic male sentimental author disappearing into the anxiety of influence. What Tender Is the Night also needs, perhaps, is an Esther Summerson from Dickens’ Bleak House (1854) to narrate part of her own story. Fitzgerald’s Eczema Woman wells up in her bitterness to scream “look at me!,” which is the deformation Esther wears on her face from smallpox and her

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(unwed) mother Lady Dedlock wears on the inside with her sense of sin and guilt. Esther is an empathetic girl child with mysterious parentage, an ageless wisdom about people, and scarring from the pox, who is a more psychologically complex heroine than ­Nicole or Rosemary. Fitzgerald’s fury at the harlot’s mind of America is akin to Dickens’ narrator in Bleak House angrily interpolating and adumbrating Esther’s story. The novel’s narration of sixty-­seven chapters is split roughly in half between Esther’s and Dickens’ “voice.” Bleak House flourishes through a schizophrenic narration that might call up a Gamp-­Diver. In Tender, Dickens fades into his successor, the sentimentalist fig­ure of Mrs. Burnett, who is a more specific target for Fitzgerald to probe sentiment’s strengths and weaknesses. Other fictional bridges may connect Dickens, Burnett, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Lee Edelman discusses George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and the child Hephzibah (Eppie) for whom Silas “gives up his worship of gold for the golden curls of the child he finds on his hearth . . . as the assurance not only of his future but also of hers and ours as well” (54). Silas Marner has hoarded gold coins (272 British pounds, subsequently stolen from him) but the coming of Eppie allows him to replace his gold fixation with her care. Eliot writes of Silas’s transformative moment in the “conversion” of his currency: “He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls. In utter amazement, Silas fell on his knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a sleeping child—a round fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head” (105–06). Significantly for Fitzgerald, perhaps, Silas renames the child Eppie after his mother and sister who were both named Hephzibah. Eppie is a firm example of the child woman as power, the real gold standard that was installed in sentimental fiction in the Victorian era. Eppie is a literal child-­woman who replaces the gold and is true gold. Dick Diver has spent his life seeking that girl child, becoming her, replacing her, and fantasizing her seduction and rescue.5 The sentimental lineage of this child fig­ure is almost Biblical as well as transgendered in continual rotation: Dickens’ Tiny Tim begets Eliot’s Eppie who begets Burnett’s Cedric Errol who begets Mary Pickford who begets Shirley Temple. For Fitzgerald and Faulkner casting for golden girl children, Rosemary Hoyt and Temple Drake live in the field of this tenaciously generated popu­lar force as well. Dickens was also the fictional laureate of “punning” through names from Grad­ grind to Skimpole to Smallweed to Merdle and so on. Dick(ens?) Diver created by Francis Scott Key (Frances Burnett?) Fitzgerald has his textual genesis in Francis Melarky, whose blustering surname surely suggests Fitzgerald’s attitude toward him as a collection of bogus attitudes. In the Melarky Manuscripts, Francis already has a checkered past, in­clud­ing being expelled from West Point for striking an officer, and his relations with his mother Charlotte are cold and querulous.

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Rather than go to Europe with his mother like Cedric to gain his true place as Lord Fauntleroy, Francis is adrift with his mother along to police him. Passages in the Melarky Manuscripts suggest Francis’s relationship with his mother could be both skewed and akin to Cedric’s relationship with his mother. Francis himself was in love with an older woman in Hollywood, perhaps someone his mother’s age: “I mean really older—almost faded” (Melarky Manuscript 160). Francis Melarky is the anti-­Cedric—not kind or attentive to his mother. Cedric, like a nurse, takes over caring for a grieving mother. The putative “matricide” that Fitzgerald toys with really becomes an absorption and clearing space for Dick to function in the maternal role in Tender. Fitzgerald’s opposition of the stark clinical emptiness of sexuality and love in Sanctuary as well as his naming play with the flooded, almost queasy mother-­son love affair in Fauntleroy is his gut reaction as an author-­reader: “the books are simply two faces of the same world spirit”— this is the attraction and repulsion of sentiment and sensation for him as an author. With the creation of Dick Diver, Fitzgerald found a way to write the “soft matricide” into his hero’s ascendancy and downfall.

“He is such a little man, I really think he knows” Cedric Errol from infancy in Fauntleroy appears to understand how to fulfill his widowed mother’s need for affective sympathy. Burnett combines this power with his pub­lic personality that makes him much loved: “His greatest charm was this cheerful, fearless, quaint little way of making friends with people. I think it arose from his having a very confiding nature and a kind little heart that sympathized with everyone, and wished to make everyone as comfortable as he liked to be himself. It made him very quick to understand the feelings of those about him” (9). Burnett writes a primer of the performance of sentimental politics while prefiguring some of Fitzgerald’s preoccupations for male children. As he anatomized Dick Diver in his decline in Tender, he wrote, “It had early become a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment when he had realized that he was the last hope of a decaying clan. On an almost parallel occasion back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen this sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved” (302). Burnett’s lines about little ­Cedric, absurd in their weighty awareness for a three-­year-­old, disturbingly describe Fitzgerald’s professionally youthful and eager heroes very well. Gatsby “concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor” and “believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself ” (48). Dick as a powerful male professional is constantly implicating Tender’s large cast in his sentimental need-­ dramas for love and control that originate in childhood.

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Dick’s models for genteel manly conduct are early imbibed and learned from his father’s mid-­Victorian and Maryland gentleman’s manners and intuited behavior and his own upbringing in the 1890s, a decade after Cedric Errol—­although Fitzgerald mercifully allows Dick to go downtown with his father in a more Spar­tan “starched duck sailor suit” (203). More disturbing lessons are found in ­Cedric’s “liaison” with his mother that relate to Dick’s specific marital and professional plight with ­Nicole and Rosemary. Little Cedric is not only preternaturally sympathetic, he has also learned how to please (court) his mother after his father’s death. Burnett is a rampantly coy writer, who first absolves the tiny ­Cedric of sensuality: “his childish soul was full of kindness and innocent warm feeling,” and then suggests that he learned from his father to call “his mama . . . by pretty loving names . . . and so he learned, too, to be careful of her”; he was “not much more than a baby” when he knew he “had to do what he could to make her happy” so “he climbed upon her knee and kissed her, and put his curly head on her neck” (9–10). Cedric’s mother confides to a servant, “Oh Mary!. . . . I am sure he is trying to help me in his innocent way—I know he is. He looks at me sometimes with a loving, wondering little look, as if he were sorry for me, and then he will come and pet me, or show me something. He is such a little man, I really think he knows” (10). Her speech resembles a woman telling her confidante about an attractive suitor, mingling “help,” “sorrow,” “petting,” and what a “little man” might want to “show,” and all by age three! Burnett’s prose is classic popu­lar prurience, delivering in comfortable suggestiveness for the audience, a mother’s pleasure in her tiny son’s attentive masculinity. What makes Burnett’s work “vicious” for Fitzgerald in Tender is the am­bigu­ ously gendered sympathetic/seductive boy child who might grow up to be Dick Diver or transform into Rosemary Hoyt or most grimly into ­Nicole War­ren who, after her mother’s death, as her father relates, “used to come into [my] bed every morning. . . . [I] was sorry for the little thing” (129). It’s not Cedric’s curls or his velvet ruffles; the “viciousness” is in the transference, both gendered, and involving the Warren family incest. In Tender, Burnett’s venerated boy child becomes in part ­Nicole, the adolescent violated girl; the grieving adored mother in Burnett becomes the grieving molesting father in Tender. The uncanny slippage in ages, gender, and family positioning, so nominally innocent in Burnett, is almost a first principle in Tender for Fitzgerald’s main characters. Dick is aligned early in Tender with Cedric’s skills with people: he “had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncriti­cal love” and “won over everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect” (27–28).6 Fitzgerald points to this “winning” as viciousness by deflecting it toward Mrs. Burnett’s fantasy of the nursery that ­Rosemary gets to mime in adolescence for the Ameri­can audience. This is quite a Hollywood

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parlay on one ticket for Fitzgerald, encapsulating all sentimental and sensational roles. ­Rosemary too may be linked with Cedric who has “bright curly hair which waved over his forehead and fell in charming love-­locks upon his shoulders” (11). Rosemary’s initial description in Tender begins, “Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blond and gold” (3). Cedric and ­Rosemary both unreservedly love their mothers, both their fathers are dead, and they are instinctive performers who travel abroad with their mother. Cedric is “such a handsome blooming curly-­headed little fellow” (45), and Dick tells Rosemary that it’s been a long time since he saw someone blooming (Tender 22). Cedric, like Dick Diver, is a performer “always ready to . . . add to the general entertainment” (47). He is, ultimately, the “little man,” the quiescent male member, the sentimental child as harmless baby seducer. Fitzgerald may have reworked Cedric’s innocent vamping of his mother in Dick Diver’s last interview with Mary North on the Riviera beach. When Dick toys with Mary by stating soulfully “there has always been something between you and me” and she eagerly responds, “Has there, Dick?” we see that she is in his emotional thrall, his old magic still briefly, if shallowly, intact. He then affirms, “always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” Mary in a possible reworking of Burnett’s “Dearest” (what Cedric cloyingly calls his mother), responds to Dick, “I always thought you knew a lot. . . . More about me than any one has ever known.” Their glances “married suddenly, bedded, and strained together” (314) in an orgasmic coyness that Fitzgerald may have sensed in Burnett’s seduction scene between son and mother.7 The tangled web of sympathetic and seductive representation in early Hollywood film is nowhere better portrayed than in the career of Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” the most popu­lar Ameri­can female film star before the phenomenon of Shirley Temple in the early 1930s. After a hardscrabble stage and touring life in early adolescence, she had gone to work for the legendary D. W. Griffith at the beginning of his career in New York and played in forty-­five short reelers in 1909 and thirty-­five in 1910.8 She starred in The Little Princess (1917), Daddy Long Legs (1919), and in 1921, she played in the oddest Little Lord Fauntleroy of them all. At age twenty-­ nine and ample in form, she played both Cedric in velvet and sweetheart curls as well as his mother in an early triumph of split-screen photography and editing. Pickford actually got to kiss “herself ” on screen for several sec­onds. Prigozy cites Pickford as “the most innocent child-­woman and the most resourceful, indomitable, and ultimately triumphant daddy’s girl ever to grace the screen” (208). Temple Black in her autobiography noted that Pickford proposed that “she and I co-­star in an epic based on her relationship with her mother” (64, emphasis mine). This offer comes in 1940, one year after the eleven-­year-­old Temple had

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played Sarah Crewe in The Little Princess, which diluted Pickford’s 1917 version with subplots and dance routines. Rosemary at age eighteen playing “younger” in Daddy’s Girl is consistent with all of Pickford’s most memorable roles (as well as Lois Moran’s screen contributions); these Hollywood girl-­women certainly made the change from Francis Melarky to Rosemary Hoyt in the Diver Manuscripts a more effortless one for Fitzgerald. In 1939, Fitzgerald rather airily approached Temple’s parents to see if he could interest them in having eleven-­year-­old Shirley play Honoria in a film version of his story “Babylon Revisited.” To Mrs. Temple, Scott presumptuously wrote, “I was very impressed with the kid—no trace of coyness or cuteness . . . she is a perfect thing now in her own way, and I would like to see that exquisite glow and tranquility carried intact through a sustained dramatic action.” He more candidly sums up in a letter to Z ­ elda in July 1940, “The Temple thing is this. She’s too old to have a child’s appeal and though they’ve put everything in her last pictures—song, dance, sleight-­of-­hand, etc.—they fail to hold the crowd. In fact, the very last [Young People] is rather nauseous in its sentimentality” (Temple Black 321–22). These two quotes taken together—Scott’s sales pitch to Temple’s mother and the appraisal to Z ­ elda—actually limn his twin responses to sentiment very well. He strains so hard to disjoin Temple’s ideal image and projected persona from bad sentiment. The letter to Temple’s mother could have fig­ured Rosemary at her whole-­souled sentimental best for Dick in Tender, whereas to ­Zelda, Scott exposes Shirley’s tricked-­out age and empty vaudeville talents that comprise yet another adjectival triumph in “nauseous sentimentality.” Thus the conflicted issues in sentiment continue in his imagination to the end of his career with only slight rewording. In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Cedric has no siblings and his dead father is no rival. It’s “Cedric and Dearest,” a perfect son and mother in love, as in Steven Spielberg’s AI (2001) where mother and son are frozen in perpetuity and the mechanical child gets his wish to be a real boy who monopolizes mother’s time in a world of two for one glorious day in an underwater eternity. Cedric in England is kept segregated from his Ameri­can mother except for brief daily visits to her cottage on the estate’s property, for when Cedric’s grandfather, Lord Fauntleroy, roars to Cedric, “Do you never forget about your mother,” Cedric firmly answers, “No, never; and she never forgets about me” (121). In the most primary displacement, the son chastely replaces the father through an uncomplicated incest toward the mother and functions for her as protector and companion. Here is a model for Dick Diver replacing the Devereux Warren who told ­Nicole that there would be just the two of them. Fitzgerald always intuited that sentiment was always underwritten by radical displacements of gender and power. When bodies matter for Fitzgerald—and they always do—sentiment is always potentially seduction and thus finally depends in his work on the right sort of body for ap-

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probation or acceptability. This male body, however, does not endure in Fitzgerald’s text without his and Dick Diver’s ressentiment. For Fitzgerald, Mrs. Burnett is “vicious” in Little Lord Fauntleroy because she has contorted a boy child into a seductive nurturing toy for the mother’s emotional satisfaction in her mourning. Thus Fitzgerald again arguably confronts his early childhood role before the grieving Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald. Tender Is the Night in all its rare beauty is also itself a “vicious tract,” a sexual madhouse beneath the “whole-­souled” sentimental yearning. This fact ultimately provides the novel with much of its sensational emotional gravitas across years of drafts and imaginings.

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Sanctuary How an author absorbs influences from another author and text is a complex matter and can never fully be known. I suggest that for Scott Fitzgerald, it was nothing less than the full range of sentiment and its relation to sensation that he intuited in Burnett and Faulkner. Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sanctuary touched on every corner of his relation to mother and siblings: his androgynous imagination that slid so easily between male and female registers, and the fig­ure of the father as the law from the symbolic that hovered over all his fictional representation. Fauntleroy provided him with a portrayal of a tiny male child’s innocent masculine nature that confirmed his view of the popu­lar culture’s “sof­tening and debasing.” Sanctuary written by an author of equal stature to Fitzgerald, daringly took the sexual and incest imaginary into realms that must have stunned him with their brilliance, even as he recoiled from their overt decadence and non-­ sentimental grotesque rendition. Everywhere Fitzgerald turned in Faulkner’s text, he would have been confronted with avatars of brothers, sisters, incestuous longings, and the breakdown of fixed gender categories as well as the family romance into new configurations. The harsh underpinning to Tender’s many sexual scripts is brutally and relentlessly on display in Sanctuary with none of Fitzgerald’s commitment to romance. Improbably enough, perhaps the best description of how Fitzgerald may have been influenced by Faulkner’s Sanctuary comes from James Watson’s account of Faulkner “in performance” in which he postulates that Faulkner might have borrowed from The Great Gatsby to account for Candace Compson’s brief romance with the mysterious Dalton Ames in The Sound and the Fury. Watson writes, “Faulkner found in such reading as well as his own writing an accretive means of expression for very personal matters in his life. Mirroring his personal circumstances in the startling ways that it does, The Great Gatsby becomes a means of performance for successive self-­presentations” (102). If we reverse the polarities and inquire as to Fitzgerald’s reading of Faulkner and its personal meanings for

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him, we can speculate as to the intensities he found, even as he said how much he wanted to “avoid” Krafft-­Ebing and Faulkner. And yet Fitzgerald made Dick Diver as hero a psychiatrist in the cradle of European psychiatric praxis as well as a doctor steeped in cases of incest, sexual disorders, and intimate family breakdowns. Also, the structure of Sanctuary described in Watson’s account grew haltingly from Faulkner’s personal tensions that are quite similar to those articulated in Fitzgerald’s writing life during Tender’s final creation: a marriage in crisis, longing for the representation of a daughter and (imaginary) sisters, a romantic hero in eclipse, a desire to write for the market as well as for his own talent, and a first draft significantly changed for publication. Watson deems Sanctuary a most personal book for Faulkner on all counts, that its “intimate self-­presentation” called for “distancing and disguise” with “strenuous revisions” in its two versions as blocks of material were moved and relocated. Watson cites Noel Polk to the effect that Faulkner revised Sanctuary so heavily “because he found Horace [Benbow’s] life intolerably close.” He concludes, “Faulkner dared in Sanctuary nothing less than the pub­lic revelations of his inmost emotional life” (87–88, 102). Certainly I deem Tender Is the Night to be Fitzgerald’s most personal novel, the one that cuts closest to his deepest sense of self and family as well as to his adult crisis involving ­Zelda’s long illness and the ways all is imbricated in his evolving sense of his vocation as a novelist. In Tender’s General Plan, it’s noticeable how little Fitzgerald’s language speaks of psychiatric analy­sis at all, rather how centered is his commentary on “idealism,” “corruption,” and the “bourgeois sentimental.” In the “Method of Dealing with Sickness Material,” he writes like a browsing scholar: “Read books and decide which type of case.” In other words, he’s a novelist with the requisite creative imperatives, feeling perhaps that the indirection of his portraits of Dick, Devereux Warren, and ­Nicole at the culture’s center of financial and medical power is a clear enough marker toward Tender’s grotesque underpinning and hegemony. Sanctuary was published on Feb. 9, 1931; Fitzgerald’s letter to Cary Ross about reading the two novels is dated Sept. 3, 1932. Cline mentions ­Zelda giving a friend Sanctuary to read in Oc­to­ber 1931 “to wake her up” (294). Since Scott doesn’t mention reading the novel until fall 1932 (“have been reading . . .”), it would appear Z ­ elda read the novel first and perhaps put him on to it. James Polchin comments that Freudian terminology entered the Ameri­can vocabulary in 1920s, making its way into criminology and science as part of the case history format, which Fitzgerald cites in working up his notes on the material for Tender’s completion. One of most popu­lar texts was Principles of Abnormal Psychology, which had everything from practical suggestions on personal and mental hygiene to disquisitions on “deviant sexual and social behavior.” There was a greater availability of “sexologist” publications such as those by Krafft-­Ebing,

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Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld. By 1931 and Sanctuary, rape and homosexuality were labeled as “similar” disorders, and male sexual deviancy was called a threat to social and gendered order (Polchin 146–47). It was not a matter for Fitzgerald of eschewing rape or thoughts of incest or the gendered slippage and sexual imaginary but rather Faulkner rendering the impotence of the romantic hero and the deconstruction of “the girl” that were always at the heart of Fitzgerald’s reverie. Another Faulknerian correspondence with Fitzgerald’s intimation of himself as a writer can be seen in Faulkner’s later explanation of the inscription of his characters in The Sound and the Fury (1929), his masterwork immediately prior to Sanctuary, that he always cited as his most powerful sustained creative experience. Faulkner wrote, “I did not realize [in 1928–29] that I was trying to manufacture [in Candace Compson] the sister which I did not have and the daughter which I was to lose.” Faulkner was thinking of Caddy and Ala­bama, his and ­Estelle’s daughter who died in infancy in 1931, in connection with their daughter Jill’s birth in June 1933; he had conceived of Caddy as sister-­daughter and saw “I could be in it, the brother and father both.” He says that he gave Caddy three brothers: Q uentin who loved her with incest, Jason who loved her with hatred and the “outraged pride of a father,” and Benjy who loved her with the complete “mindlessness of a child” (Watson 9–10). To partially articulate Faulkner’s intent for Caddy with Fitzgerald and Dick Diver’s many impulses, we could posit the Dick Diver who perhaps loved his two deceased sisters, the Dick Diver who replicated and continued the role of Devereux Warren in the act of saving ­Nicole, and the baby Scott/Dick who loved the (absent) sisters with a completeness but asked as a more cool-­eyed and disabused adult, “Have I been nourished?” (313). Faulkner concludes about The Sound and the Fury, “I was inside the book. I was Q uentin and Jason and Benjy . . . learning each day what I could do. . . . I was still being each one of them in turn” (Watson 10). Although Sanctuary is the novel Fitzgerald cites, The Sound and The Fury with its moving and complex meditations on brothers, sisters, and incest could not have been unknown to him as a strong text determining his personal emotional response and darkening of presentation. Faulkner in Sanctuary also provided an obsessive visualizing of Temple Drake’s body that Fitzgerald must have noticed. Horace Benbow describes the college girls streaming by him and takes each of his depressing romantic reveries back to his confused congruences among the images of his mother, wife, stepdaughter, Temple Drake, and Ruby Goodwin. Fitzgerald’s nostalgia is more sympathetically romantic in sentimental sadness for a racially non-­nuanced nineteenth century whereas Faulkner, stunned by a mad racial and his­tori­cal South­ern past that is

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always present, is never nostalgic or sentimental as he veers more toward tragedy and comedy than the realism tinged with romance of Fitzgerald. Faulkner’s affinity for a passion of extremes in emotion and genre statement and Fitzgerald’s modulation into a middle range of both emotional tenor and fictional experiment have continued to define their reputations as authors: Faulkner the modernist genius who freely ranges in origi­nal form, Fitzgerald the romantic realist continually flirting with the popu­lar and his notion of success, Faulkner possessed by the South and by race, Fitzgerald “in thrall” to beauty and to America in ways that Faulkner transcends. What may link them most strongly is the repeated saga— underscored in Sanctuary and Tender Is the Night—of mother, father, brothers, sisters, rape, incest, and the guilt and awe at the power of unresolved love, rescue, and possession. Robert Wexelblatt writing of Fitzgerald’s putative debts in Tender to D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious makes the commonsense observation that it is erroneous to feel that Fitzgerald merely borrowed Lawrence’s ideas for, like all of us, “Fitzgerald tended to become attached to books which could present him with his own more vagrant insights in systematized form,” that what Fitzgerald liked was the “ability to organize his own intuitions and thus confirm them” (378–79). For example, Doreen Fowler writes that in revising Sanctuary, Faulkner shifted his focus from Horace’s Oedipal feelings for his mother to Temple’s abduction and rape (Fowler 431). Similarly, Fitzgerald in his many passes through the Tender material moved from Francis Melarky’s aimless resentment and desires to his conception of Dick Diver saving the incestuously violated ­Nicole and desiring Rosemary.9 In the published versions of Tender and Sanctuary, the primal male obsession with mother in the respective manuscript drafts is displaced onto “the girl’s” violation. For Fitzgerald in his Tender manuscripts, the consistent animus is described as “God damn these women!” and “How Many Women Is Power?” Both lines and scenes are finally cut (Francis’s epithet and Dick-­as-­Gamp’s rueful truth); yet both remain felt in Tender, as did Horace’s reveries about his mother, which are cut from the origi­nal Sanctuary. Fitzgerald veers away from a Popeye, labeled “vicious” by Faulkner, and displaces “vicious” to the sentimental lady novelist as exhibit in Daddy’s Girl. For Faulkner, “­ [Popeye’s] hat jerked in a dull, vicious gleam in the twilight”; “Popeye looked about with a sort of vicious cringing” (Sanctuary 7) and his “face had a queer bloodless color . . . he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin” (4). In The Hamlet (1940), Flem Snopes’s bow tie is “a tiny viciously depthless cryptically balanced splash like an enigmatic punctuation symbol” (64). Did Fitzgerald purloin and intuit “tiny viciously depthless” to pertain to Mrs. Burnett and her doughty little boy? “Mrs. Burnett” as an addition in Tender most likely came after Fitzgerald’s letter to Ross about his reading.

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Men “Reading” Each Other: Boys and Mothers As Dick Diver “reads” Francisco and Dum­phry and himself through them in Book Three of Tender Is the Night (245–46), Fitzgerald comes closest to Faulkner’s opening scene in Sanctuary where Popeye and Horace regard each other across the spring. Faulkner wrote, “In the spring the drinking man [Horace] leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye’s straw hat, though he had heard no sound” (3). Faulkner’s brilliant image of Horace seeing Popeye overlaid on his own jagged image begins a pages-­long eyeballing of the two men across this refracting space. Fitzgerald had constructed the mental image of Dick reviewing his friendships fostered in World War I (“the broken universe of the war’s ending”); his own “myriad reflections” are then slashed by Dum­phry’s appearance that cuts his reverie. Popeye in effect “abrupts” into Sanctuary’s unconscious as well; his breaking and entering Horace’s gaze is akin to what Dick finally sees in Dum­phry as a “shattered reflection” of charm. Fitzgerald essentially breaks ­Popeye into two fig­ures within the same extended image—Francisco and Dum­ phry, the good and bad gay characters who will captivate and repel Dick within alternate moments. Andre Bleikasten conceives of Horace’s view as “first a hidden gaze, then a dislocated reflection,” and “for Horace at least, Popeye acquires visibility only through the relay of a replication, the mediacy of an image” (257). Dick and Francisco are united through Dick’s hidden, internalized “gaze” in his epiphany about sentimental charm while Dum­phry “dislocates” that reflection. Fitzgerald uses Francisco and Dum­phry together in one pivotal emblem scene whereas ­Popeye is always uncannily present in Sanctuary; we never see him approach or go away (Bleikasten 231). Fitzgerald has no aberrant fig­ure such as ­Popeye at every turn but will have flashes of such intensity: the plot of Daddy’s Girl, the shooting by Maria Wallis, the dead Jules Peterson in Rosemary’s bed, Dum­phry’s and Devereux Warren’s return, Kaethe Gregorovious touching ­Nicole’s arm, and the “nest” walking toward Dick and Dum­phry at the hotel in Lausanne. The vision of Popeye intruding into Horace’s reflection on the first page of Sanctuary would be akin to beginning Tender with Dick, Francisco, and Dum­ phry on the terrace. Instead, of course, Tender begins with Rosemary’s naive gaze on the beach as she attempts to arrange the groups of expatriates into a recognizable social mimesis. Greg Forter articulates the bleakest vision of what an impotent sentimentalizing could be like for a character such as Horace who wants to identify with Temple and Ruby Goodwin but is paralyzed by all his (female) ghosts (“Murdering Masculinities” 99). Fitzgerald would never go quite this far in Tender, even as Dick is stunned into Horace’s level of sentimental disgust. In addition, the roles of Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Popeye in Sanctuary gave

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Fitzgerald two models of an overwritten male child at the center of the novels’ experiential worlds. Sweet little Cedric beguiles everyone, and Popeye’s presence is also everywhere, yet full of silent menace. Faulkner’s early physical descriptions of him at the spring are of “a man of under size, his hands in his coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His suit was black with a tight, high-­waisted coat. His trousers were rolled once and caked with mud above mud-­caked shoes”; also, “his skin had a dead, dark pallor. His nose was faintly aquiline, and he had no chin at all. His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll” (4–5). Faulkner appears to cross reference a young boy like Cedric with a rougher backwoods version collapsed into a familiar image of a young tough from the 1930s. Unlike Cedric’s halcyon days with his mother “Dearest,” Popeye’s early life is a mystery to Sanctuary’s readers until Faulkner appends a final chapter, which chronicles a case history of Popeye from conception to his execution for a murder he didn’t commit. Popeye is born on Christmas Day to a single mother. His grandmother tries to burn him to death in a fire; when a policeman asks, “where is the child,” she responds, “I traded it in” (299). Popeye was institutionalized by age five and the doctors pronounce “he will never be a man, properly speaking. . . . He will never be any older than he is now” (300)—at about the age when C ­ edric’s mother gushes to her maid about her little son-­suitor’s rapt attention, “he is such a little man, I really think he knows” (10). Clearly Popeye’s “little man” will not get bigger while Cedric’s “little man” is symbolically activated much earlier than normal. Cedric is already a parody of an adult male, fulfilling his mother’s emotional needs in Burnett’s fantasy, which cuts close to Devereux Warren’s suggestion to young ­Nicole: “now let’s not pay any attention to anybody else this afternoon—­let’s just have each other—for this morning, you’re mine” (Tender 129). Faulkner clearly labels Popeye sexually inadequate at the same age that Burnett makes precocious Cedric his mother’s innocent toddler-­seducer. Each boy is in early and unnatural relation to the onset of pubescence. This comparison between the Faulkner and Burnett texts must have been key to Fitzgerald when he called them “two faces of the same world spirit,” which limn premature sexual death and premature sexual precocity to deflate and inflate male desire, both in an “unnatural” fig­ure of a young boy. Sanctuary’s coda about little Popeye may show Faulkner ironically and derisively hurling a case history at the reader, in effect saying, here it is, all the facts out of which one could elicit a sentimental response to this devastated child. The extreme centering on boy children in a spectrum of sexual perversity chal­ lenges the vision of a child representing coherence, linear narrative, and organic signification. To considerable degree, my analy­sis in Chapter 2 concerning Fitzgerald’s mourning the death of his two infant sisters contributes a similar criti­cal veneration of the power of early childhood that Edelman critiques in No Future. In

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my analy­sis, Dick Diver and Fitzgerald by extension must always be centered on the early traumas in the Fitzgerald nursery with compensatory plot lines in the fiction. What Edelman calls the “lengthening shadow of the child” does in my view trouble any adult action by Dick Diver with its more buried compulsion that he is doomed to repeat over and over in his relations with ­Nicole and others. What Sanctuary adds to this centering on the child is the repeated image of Ruby Goodwin’s sickly infant, kept in a box behind the stove, its arms of­ten raised in a pose of crucifixion, the living icon who is an avatar of Popeye and doomed twin to Popeye himself. Edelman states that it’s the “queer” that occupies the child’s “abject negative” space” (179); such a concept defines what Faulkner achieves with Popeye’s impotence and eyeballing of Horace as well as Dick’s warming to the boy Francisco and his denial of Dum­phry, a “comely” young man. Another powerful narrative thrust—that of classic Freudian theory and family romance— moves the child into the past as psychic marker and map to the present of the adult’s disorder. In a sense, Francisco and then Dum­phry “bringing” Devereux Warren relieves Dick of the “two sisters” pressure, focusing instead on the allied displacing narrative of his adult responsibility for friends and lovers. Barounis concludes that Popeye as stunted child becomes the death-­driven perpetually mod­ern future while Temple is seen with her arms around the box behind the stove, telling the baby, “my father’s a judge.”10 Horace Benbow is fixated on saving this baby, hearing Temple’s rape testimony, and dealing with his fantasies of desire about his own stepchild, Little Belle. The innocent Cedric in Fauntleroy loves to love his mother and springs into his role as the optimistic, egalitarian male child representing America to the world. Such a little Lord Fauntleroy there has never been! For Horace to encounter Temple as a substitute “repeats a maternal proximity” and what it would mean to “lose this loss” would be to “reveal the maternal sanctuary as a devouring repetition of self ” (Forter 113). Burnett, of course, is blind to this “annihilation”; in Fauntleroy, Cedric is the sanctuary for his mother. In Tender, Dick is that normality and peace but it is purchased through the illusion of a “rigid domesticity” that he does not feel (170) and a lean chest that has been suckled dry (279). Cast as perverse, Dum­phry (another Cedric) injects the double cadence of gay and maternal in Dick’s gaze (another Popeye); Bleikasten notes that Popeye, Temple, and Horace all demonstrate an inability to outgrow childhood (254) and I would add Dick Diver to that group. In Tender, characters also are imagined as utterly young. For Rosemary, “the dew was still on her” (4); ­Nicole is a “scarcely saved waif of disaster” (136). Behind these very young female bodies are the dead sisters who did not mature and move Fitzgerald and Dick Diver to make an imprint on the world by performing and “saving” while always sensing the impotence of sentimental care as a substitute for seduction. Popeye and Cedric gave Fitzgerald

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much to think about in Faulkner and Burnett’s uncanny polarizing images of the “dead” impotent boy child and his counterpart, the romantic boy child savior.11 Faulkner gives the Compson brothers in The Sound and the Fury significant relations to their mother and to their sister Candace. They comprise a full range of the associations that Fitzgerald might have felt when envisioning his roles for Dick Diver. Benjy Compson can be imagined as the thirty-­three-­year-­old anti-­Cedric. He is the constant, if shallow, concern of his mother, while Jason, his brother, feels his life has been ruined by the family centering on his retarded sibling. A fulcrum of the novel’s sympathetic imaginary, Benjy mourns Caddy’s loss and the sale of his beloved pasture for the money to send Q uentin to Harvard. His bellows and moans are the novel’s heart sounds, keening in protest against the inhumanity and loss in the Compson family; he is also grotesquely without language, yet an emotional center through whom Faulkner writes the pain of primary loss. Benjy’s physical description is that of a gutted boy who has never bloomed: “his skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical, too; he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerreotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little” (290). Cedric is described by Burnett as follows: “he started in life with a quantity of soft, fine gold-­coloured hair, which curled up at the ends, and went into loose rings by the time he was six months old”; Burnett continues to point out his big brown eyes, darling little face, strong back, and sturdy legs (8). In Faulkner’s passages, Benjy begins as an aged man, and then becomes a hulking adult whom Faulkner then shades to a child’s portrait before concluding on the thick drooling mouth in a brilliant series of contrasts. In Sanctuary, Ruby’s Goodwin’s baby is barely alive, “the bluish eyelids showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead colored cheeks, the moist shadow of hair capping its skull” (116). Faulkner’s juxtapositions arrest Benjy as an idiot child, Popeye a deformed one, and Ruby’s infant hopelessly ill, whereas Burnett instrumentally outfits healthy, blooming Cedric to become his mother’s courtier.12 If Benjy Compson is the physical shell of a blooming boy, then Jason Compson is the furious son with a bill of particulars against his siblings and their mother. Jason begins his narration in part three of The Sound and the Fury with his maxim, “once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (198). Jason’s towering quarrels with the women in his family are for what he considers his servitude, providing for the family, which keeps him chained to a desk in a dead-­end job, in the wake of his brother Q uentin’s suicide, Candace’s disappearance, and Benjy’s idiocy. Jason is a terminally bitter wit who challenges his mother’s lethargic and insincere self-­ recrimination of “I know I’m just a trouble and a burden to you,” with the retort, “I ought to know it. . . . You’ve been telling me that for thirty years” (199). She is

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resentful of his attention even as she craves it, mouthing platitudes about suffering but feeling nothing other than her own multiple anxieties. Mother and son are tied to one another over Benjy, Caddy, brother Q uentin’s suicide and Q ­uentin, Jason’s niece, who becomes a sexual object Jason compulsively torments because he can. Fitzgerald would have seen in Faulkner’s Compson family a brother and sister relationship with Jason ominously replacing Q uentin’s incestuous love for Caddy and Benjy’s equally helpless love of her. Jason is on duty as much as is Dick Diver but is a sadistic caregiver, the anti-­Dick Diver—as Popeye is to Cedric Errol in Fitzgerald’s intimation. Jason certainly does “carry” the Compson egos but remains as broken as they do themselves, in a reverse of Dick’s view that friends and lovers “complete” him (Tender 245). Faulkner’s narrative choice of Benjy, Q uentin, and Jason to render the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury expresses Fitzgerald’s intimation about what made him a writer—the pressure of a male child in a family imaginary over-­determined by the “deaths” of sisters: the sentimental and sensational nuclear family skewing power and gendered identifications.

Rosemary Hoyt and Temple Drake Both Rosemary Hoyt and Temple Drake are caught in the male gaze in their respective novels but Fitzgerald’s and Faulkner’s perceptions of that captivity are very different. For Fitzgerald, Rosemary is an uncomplicated product of Hollywood, the furthest popu­lar evolution of both “the girl” and of Burnett’s prescient little Cedric. For Faulkner, Temple runs furtively and obsessively through the maze of the Old Frenchman’s Place, twitching to Popeye’s absent presence as if he were a passive porn director. She is the girl made vacant, voided of ­Rosemary’s penumbra of cinematic protection. Fitzgerald’s repeated sentimentalizing and seducing of “the girl” has its more intense counterpart in Faulkner’s over-­determining the lives of the Compson brothers by their sister Caddy in The Sound and the Fury and in Sanctuary by Temple, Belle, Little Belle, and Narcisa Benbow, Ruby Goodwin, and her sexless baby who all become Horace Benbow’s collective female imago determining his psyche and conduct. Temple Drake radically re-­imagines what would stave off her “rape” by Popeye (208–13) and then Horace alters and completes her account through his own desire, identification, and self-­disgust. Faulkner gives the “story” to his dreamy lawyer to finish, making Temple’s violation into that of the male as well (213–16). He writes a bravura nightmare of rancid, furtive intimacy in which Popeye (the black “little man”) hovers and where Temple dwells in “spent red curls” (29), arms around the Goodwin baby’s box chanting “my father’s a judge” (53), speaking baby talk (54), and looking “more compatible with [age] eight or ten” [67].

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Fitzgerald gives Rosemary a resigned view of her own possible deflowering. She whispers to Dick, “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it—I never expected to—I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t I want you to”(64). Rosemary believes it’s all right to look at her, to undress and “take her”; after all, millions do so in the dark theater. Her “modern” view is laced with a residue of Victorian resignation and inevitability and uncluttered by psy­ cho­analy­sis. Faulkner in Sanctuary takes the reader on a more desperate ride in brilliant succession through Temple’s narrative deferrals. Temple relates her serial psychological strategies to Horace for fending off Popeye’s assault. She imagines that she grows a penis as a boy, wears a chastity belt with long spikes, and has the skin of a flying fish that “would keep on jerking just ahead” of P ­ opeye’s hand. She also sees herself as a bride in a coffin and an iron-­grey haired older woman teacher; this culminates in her vision of self as an old man with a white beard (209–13). Physically Temple narrates to defer and to metamorphose ahead of “the little black thing” (212) that represents Popeye-­as-­phallus to her. She says, “you know how you do when you’re scared. I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy. I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking” (209). Fitzgerald’s Rosemary undergoes an appraisal by her mother that confers a safer phallic authority and earning power: “you were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl” (40). Faulkner would not be impressed with Hollywood’s child: Temple prays to be changed into a boy to save herself from rape. She wants to convert her cry “something is going to happen to me” (99) into “it’s happening to ones not me.” ­Nicole Warren’s violation remains Tender’s major absence, never narrated but absorbed and left out in Fitzgerald’s classic pattern. Yet Faulkner allows Horace Benbow, avatar of both Temple and Popeye, the narrative vision to complete her account. Horace imagines Temple’s body as his own, then imagines her above the scene of her deflowering before literally vomiting her up, the water in the toilet bowl (the equivalent of the spring at the outset of the novel), providing Faulkner with the effect of a movie screen. Horace’s mind is always pregnant with the entire image cluster of male-­female desire that Popeye’s perversion will model. Temple and Horace share the narration of her rape by Popeye and Faulkner; this expands the scene into the novel’s most memorable one. This powerful section runs counter to Fitzgerald’s scant treatment of ­Nicole’s violation in Tender Is the Night. All we have is a blurted confession by Devereux Warren before the Swiss psychiatrists. It’s certain that for Fitzgerald, “avoiding” the Faulkner “attitude” in Sanctuary extended to Faulkner’s handling of the rape, one which implicated Horace Benbow in every way with Temple’s degradation and which Fitzgerald did not want Dick Diver to helplessly imagine.

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Temple’s testimony to Horace provides him with his own perception of his sickness, his complicity in a complex desire for his step-­daughter, Little Belle and what must be expelled—her body yielding “something black and furious,” a giving birth to Popeye himself, the sickly baby that no one wants. Faulkner finally merges Horace and Temple into one body and gives Horace the epiphany-­as-­disgust to hold them in suspension, a counterpart scene to Rev. Gail Hightower placing every racial actor on a heavenly wheel or great mandala after the castration-­murder of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). What Horace finally imagines is similar in its structure and motion to Fitzgerald’s scene of Rosemary’s identification with the horse chestnut tree on the truck in Paris (Tender 79). Faulkner writes, “She was bound naked on her back on a flat car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot bodily from the tunnel in a long upward slant . . . toward a crescendo like a held breath, an interval which she would swing faintly and lazily in nothingness filled with pale, myriad points of light. Far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks” (216). Horace gives birth to this image of Temple, which culminates in her floating high over her own violation, an elite spectatorial position befitting Horace’s impotence and empty philosophizing. She speeds through what appears a birth canal, bound like ­Rosemary as the tree, but “naked,” not flowering and accepting her role.13 Yet what Fitzgerald may have taken for Tender is Horace’s wish to “save” Temple— finally save someone—high above the shucks that still beat “furiously” with the act of rape itself. Recall Rosemary’s privileged position, high on the carrot wagon observing the tree in the Paris dawn and confidently identifying with it. Temple’s final positioning may also have reminded Fitzgerald of his own centering on the Q ueen Moon surrounded by “starry fays” (the points of light)—Faulkner was another modern Ameri­can novelist who knew his Keats so well, as key “urn” images in Light in August and Go Down, Moses make clear. What Fitzgerald absorbed from Sanctuary for Rosemary may have been Temple’s final narrative angle from above and Horace’s “saving” of the out-­of-­body experience for her, not Horace’s own degradation and impotence or the squalid nature of the scene itself. Those elements—part of Faulkner’s “attitude” and far more intricate and sustained—­ Fitzgerald then “left out.”

Horace Benbow and His Women: Faulkner and Sentiment’s Futility Horace Benbow’s relation to his mother and the other women in his life may have intrigued Fitzgerald the most about Sanctuary and influenced what he was attempting to imagine through Dick Diver. Faulkner’s sentimental romantic hero has a defective relationship with every female fig­ure in his life. These relationships

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are tightly interwoven by Faulkner to depict in the origi­nal Sanctuary manuscript, Horace “mov[ing] about the tight and inscrutable desolation in a prolonged orgasm of sentimental loneliness” (Collation 85, Langford 32). Such language condenses and makes vivid what Fitzgerald may have deeply imbibed about sentiment from Faulkner’s obsessions in Sanctuary that were mirroring his own in the Tender Is the Night manuscripts.14 Forter identifies what can be called a radical disgust about the sentimental project on Horace’s part (92), and in Tender, Dick shares much of it. Dum­phry reappears and situates Dick back in the thrall of the rapist father. If the collective sympathetic liberal vision of a heart going out is that “each man’s death diminishes me,” the negative and sensational cast to that implication is that each vicious act done is also potentially mine and done to me—that Dum­ phry can bring back Dick Diver as Devereux Warren through Fitzgerald’s eyes. Fitzgerald’s key scenes in Book Three (245–52) are where Dick Diver’s desire for maternal absorption again meets Devereux Warren’s fig­ure that blocks Dick’s feelings of sympathy and charm. Fitzgerald depicts the central instability of sentimental identifications, qualified as they are in the queering and incestuous layering in the text. In Sanctuary, Horace gazes at Little Belle’s picture and is overcome by nausea; he also merges with Popeye as he assaults Temple and with Temple as assaulted. As the cob is withdrawn black from her, Horace thinks in the origi­nal Sanctuary of “thick black liquid from his dead mother in a dream.” Here is the curve of the primal scene re-­imagined with all actors in place in violent transubstantiations: Horace is born, Temple is raped, the corncob is his body, he births (vomits) himself (Fowler 420). I can envision Fitzgerald as fascinated in absorbing “Horace reading Popeye reading Horace” at the broken spring in Sanctuary’s opening scene and at the refracted characters’ “reads,” and then crafting “Dum­ phry reading Dick Diver reading Francisco” in his own parallax construction. When Dick tries to “dissect [charm’s heroism] into pieces,” Dum­phry abrupts into consciousness as does Popeye in “the shattered reflection of the straw hat” (3). What Dick sees in Francisco is the perfect moment of narcissism summarily destroyed by Dum­phry, who is the “shattered reflection” of charm. In the origi­nal Sanctuary, Horace dreams he was a boy again, after thinking about the span of time that encompasses Aunt Jenny Sartoris’s eighty-­nine years. Through his sister Narcisa and her young son, “it seemed to him that not only the past two days, but the last thirty five years had been a dream, and he waked himself calling his mother’s name in a paroxysm of terror and grief ” (Forter 111– 12). Such could be Fitzgerald’s cry for thirty-­four-­year-­old Dick Diver in the unwritten primal unconscious to his yearning in Tender to the mother he never could reach. Faulkner’s next line is “[Horace] believed that he had irrevocably lost something,” the sisters, perhaps for a Fitzgerald, who would not have known this origi­nal text of Sanctuary but may have intuited this sense from Horace’s impo-

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tent thrall to the women in the published novel. All could certainly be felt by as sensitive a reader as Fitzgerald to both Faulkner’s material and its presentation. Faulkner’s lines move serially from Horace’s mother to Narcisa and the birth of her child, then to Belle’s “rich full mouth,” which opens and the thick black liquid “splayed out upon her fading chin” (112), while the scene in the published novel switches to Popeye: “He smells like that black stuff that ran out of ­Bovary’s mouth” (Sanctuary 7). Thus the origi­nal Sanctuary stressing Horace’s obsession with Horace and his mother is more akin to the origi­nal Tender manuscripts with Francis and Charlotte Melarky, the “boy who [was to] kill his mother.” When Fowler concludes that in Sanctuary, “the very image of phallic authority, the primal scene, is disrupted and challenged by the prohibited desire, which is both a desire for incest and a desire to return to an origin identified with the matrix or mother” (421), she has comprehensively described a circulation of power through desire in Tender Is the Night as well. Fitzgerald allows Dick Diver to inhabit the following roles in parallax refraction: to be the mother, to possess the mother, and to be nurtured by the mother as a son, as a sister, or as someone who has saved the sisters. Thus Fitzgerald may have wanted initially to “avoid” Faulkner by avoiding the “erotomania” of Temple Drake but having chosen an incest plot for his heroine ­Nicole, he was compelled to look on Faulkner’s presentation more criti­cally and selectively.15 He did not know that he was grappling with a significant novelist who would in later years uncannily reference both ­Ophelia and Sarah Gamp. Finally, the remarkable parallels between Faulkner’s and Fitz­ gerald’s emotional preoccupations with maternal sympathy, sisters, and the efficacy of the sentimental meant that when Fitzgerald read Sanctuary, he must have been amazed at both how it completed the curve of Little Lord Fauntleroy in aberrant sensation but also how it may have pointed him to complete the passage of his own sister-­haunted hero by tacking among little Cedric, Popeye, and Horace Benbow—to polish and then polish off Dick Diver.

Conclusion So easy to be loved—so hard to love —Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night In Fitzgerald’s work the voice of his prose is of the essence of his success. We hear in it at once the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment. It is, I would venture to say, the normal or ideal voice of the novelist. —Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them, makes that tensity that is the secret of all charm—when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you just become another victim of self-­indulgence—breaking down the solid things around you and moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable? —Fitzgerald, The Crack-­Up The sentimental disposition (or ‘composition’) across media and across centuries . . . is something like a deep principle of intelligibility in the aesthetic and ethical structuring of experience. —James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy

Trilling’s praise of Fitzgerald’s “tenderness” toward desire is a trait that Fitzgerald severely critiques in himself, calling it in The Crack-­Up charm’s disturbed balance that leads to a vulnerable “self-­indulgence” (209). Chandler summarizes for contemporary sentimental politics both the promise and scope of sentiment from the eighteenth through the twentieth century in literature and film. Hume’s affective sentimental fig­ure has by the twentieth century and literary modernism been thoroughly subjected to Fitzgerald’s intense and rueful account of how the “heart going out” becomes vulnerable when entangled with psychic histories and mourning. They could not be disavowed in a present that yielded crises of vocation and marriage for both Dick and ­Nicole Diver and Scott and Z ­ elda Fitzgerald. So many embattled representations in Tender coexist in Fitzgerald’s sentimental scenes and are absorbed in Dick’s ongoing crisis. Yet the very marrow of Tender’s language and structure cut deep within sentiment’s relations. Colliding

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within that play are the powerful tropes of “The Girl” and “Daddy’s Girl” and the “Two Sisters.” Nostalgia for Fitzgerald begins in his mourning for the sisters; they are what made him a writer and through a reaction to what threatened him as a writer—­Zelda Fitzgerald’s illness and fiction—he fashioned ­Nicole’s saving and thus saved his novel but not the career of Dr. Diver. Dick Diver’s decline perilously signals Scott Fitzgerald’s own. Yet Tender Is the Night can also be seen as a significant fictional triumph for him. As a sentimental reader of Fitzgerald, I want to think of him as the most accomplished and also most self-­conscious sentimentalist in literary modernism. Reading from my parallax has, of course, made a difference in my gauging his parallax. I’m sympathetic to his problems, identify with his perilous charm, and mourn for his pain, while acknowledging his complicity in it for self and for ­Zelda. “So easy to be loved—so hard to love” (245) is surely Fitzgerald’s own mantra in Tender Is the Night, mirrored and arranged to best describe his sentimental sense of self and the stakes. By both craving and orchestrating regard, Dick Diver cuts off any open possibility not based on his view of himself in another one: “I arrange you to find myself in you, I absorb this image in the sentimental gap.” Such was Fitzgerald’s dynamic to consistently pattern out in his novel; it is mine in writing this study and perhaps in every reader seeking selves in fiction. I sec­ond Peter Brooks when he writes, “I certainly do want to grant at least a temporary privilege to psychoanaly­sis in literary study, in that the trajectory through psychoanaly­sis forces us to confront the human stakes of literary form, while I think that these stakes need to be considered in the text, as activated in its reading” (Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling 35). Here we find the case for a sympathetic liberal transaction activated by sentiment and reinvested in the criti­cal reading act of “an other” that stays within the formalism of a text. Fitzgerald would hold it all together—both the sentimental impulse and the implicit modern fragmentation and questioning of sentiment: he would have it all in Tender Is the Night. Yet Fitzgerald will never allow a sentimental conclusion, and as a writer, faithfully critiques his muse, and brings us the consequences of ­sentimentalizing—he can do no other. The most compromising consequence of sentiment—the abusive scene of Devereux Warren and ­Nicole Warren—is enacted and then reenacted in perpetual crisis and negation in Tender Is the Night to blanket the two sister imaginary and sustain its saving office.

“More Than Just a House”: What Presses against Us Still “I don’t know whether I love you—I don’t even know you—I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick.” —Fitzgerald, “More Than Just a House”

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In April 1933 as Fitzgerald was deep into the completion of Tender Is the Night at La Paix, he wrote a short story, “More Than Just a House,” which was published in The Saturday Evening Post ( June 24, 1933). The story captured in miniature the marital, artistic, and psychic tensions that went into the Tender manuscripts as well as drew on the South as its locale, appropriating the physical setting of La Paix to a large family of South­ern sisters, the Gunther girls, whose fates intertwine with Lew Lowrie, a young man who has fantasies of both saving and loving them. La Paix was the site of the Fitzgeralds’ grim deterioration as well as their battles for creative space. They rented La Paix on the 28-­acre Bayard Turnbull estate in Towson, immediately north of Baltimore, from May 1932 to No­vem­ber 1933. During that period ­Zelda was alternately in residence there, incarcerated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, or visiting as an outpatient. Save Me the Waltz was published in Oc­to­ber 1932. On May 28, 1933, the marathon transcribed psychiatric session between Z ­ elda and Scott occurred at La Paix. In August 1933, ­Zelda burned some of Scott’s manuscripts on the sec­ond floor, causing a serious fire. By most accounts they lived there as broken partners and artists in bursts of hope, anger, and distress, punctuated by ­Zelda’s episodes and obsessive dancing and Scott’s drunkenness and suspicion of her writings: it was at this period that ­Zelda’s doctors, in effect, thought of both Fitzgeralds as patients. Thus the idealized frame of “More Than Just a House” belies for the most part the exceeding stress underneath its writing. All in the Fitzgerald imaginary from Tender Is the Night appears to be in “More Than Just a House”—the impressionable hero, the sad, elusive, and star-­crossed sisters, a possibly degenerate father, a romantic rescue—rendered through a narrative anagrammar where bodies again are arranged like sentences. “More Than Just a House” shakes loose all Fitzgerald’s ghosts, and he borrows even more. He deploys Lew Lowrie against the three Gunther sisters, who may represent Scott’s dead sisters, ­Zelda’s three sisters, Ala­bama Beggs’ two sisters in Waltz, and perhaps even those of Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald.1 This large cast of compound ghost sisters underwrites a narrative that in displaced and compressed form brings Fitzgerald even closer in fiction to his imagined primal scene than would Tender. He does so through the essential metaphor of “house,” which in its estrangement as an adjective in “unheimlich” (uncanny) takes the reader to its root as he crosses the threshold of this edifice. “More Than Just A House” allows Fitzgerald to spirit one hysterical and ethereal sister away from the stasis and decay of the Gunther house and family.2 Lew Lowrie meets the Gunther sisters when he rescues Amanda, the eldest, from the path of an oncoming small train engine. At the outset, Fitzgerald riffs repeatedly on “rescue,” recounting how a Gunther grandmother had been saved during the Civil War “from a burning house in Montgomery County ­[Maryland],”

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the father saving men at sea, and the sec­ond daughter Jean herself saved swimming in the ocean. The Gunthers invite Lew home to “the big square box of the house,” where Mr. Gunther lauds him for his “subconscious mind [that] saw that [Amanda and Jean] were joined together—saw that if you pulled one, you pulled them both” (457). As nakedly as possible, here is Fitzgerald’s fantasy of sentimentally saving the two sisters, who are elusive voices and sensibilities rather than bodies. Amanda purrs to him, perhaps as a literary property: “I’ll always feel that you own me, Mr. Lowrie; my life is forfeit to you” (457). The upwardly mobile Lew becomes a familiar guest of the Gunthers. The sisters remain largely undifferentiated and just out of reach psychologically and romantically. The third Gunther sister, Bess, is perhaps closest to ­Zelda, youngest of four Sayre sisters, Ala­bama Beggs, who ­Zelda portrayed as the youngest of three, and Mollie McQ uillan, also the youngest of three girls. Bess Gunther is brittle, winning, and odd: “I’m going to be the Cinderella, Mr. Lowrie. They’ll be the two wicked sisters and gradually you’ll find I’m the most attractive and get all hot and bothered about me” (459). Amanda Gunther is engaged to be married and tells Lew she can’t wait to leave the house, for “it all comes down to father wanting to live fifty miles from anywhere, so we’re condemned to rot” (460). The fragments of phrasing about “rot” and female fear sound familiar in light of Devereux Warren’s patriarchal abuse and ­Nicole’s subsequent sense of “rot” hysterically intuited at key junctures in Tender (82, 112, 190). Fitzgerald then has Lew poignantly sum up his feelings about Amanda Gunther: “Gradually he realized a truth behind his grief: He had come too late for her; unknown to him, she had been slipping away through the years” (461). The mourning for the sister is equated with the dying of romance, for Lew believes he has “come too late” for “what was the excitement that had blacked out in the instant of its birth” (“House” 461). For Fitzgerald, the death of the sisters and the birth of his love for them are both logically impossible and are uncannily repeated in his desiring imagination.3 The pull of the Gunthers moves Lew to accept Jean Gunther’s invitation to Maryland, and he comes upon Jean on the porch, “very Rue-­de-­la-­Paix” (465), self-­referencing the Fitzgerald house that shares the name of the most expensive shopping street in Paris. Lew asks Jean after their father and she evinces a harshness toward the old man; he is said to have senile dementia. Lew steals a kiss from Jean, Bess returns from checking on the Gunther father. The upstairs phone rings, Bess goes to answer it as a thunderstorm begins. Jean leans closer to Lew and a great crash accompanies “sickening lightning”: a great tree has crashed down, separating the house from a lean-­to where William, a black family retainer, lies terrified. Jean cries, “It’s William’s room! There’s a tree in it” (467), particularizing William himself as the huge phallic tree that severs his (slave?) “quarters” from the white family. Lew pulls William hard through the window of his ser-

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vant’s bedroom and later, lying naked on his bed, “he dozed to wake with a jerk at the sound of his door opening: ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded, pulling the quilt up over himself,” and “there was a chuckle; a last pulse of lightning showed him three tense blue-­veined fingers, and then a man’s voice whispered: ‘I only wanted to know if you were in for the night, dear. I worry—I worry’” (467–68). Is the Gunther father also a Devereux Warren looking for a daughter in bed? This brief scene contains unmistakable compulsive material displaced from Tender and Fitzgerald’s deeper imaginative and psychic preoccupations. As clearly as he could, Fitzgerald has cross-­imagined an elder Devereux Warren walking into ­Nicole’s room but he finds Lew (Dick Diver?), a man who has just saved a black servant from a huge phallic tree. Gunther’s “surveillance” or nightly walks into his daughters’ rooms underscore Amanda Gunther’s uneasiness about her father and her previous girl visitors as well as Jean’s cold resentment of him. The father opens the door on the young man who has replaced his daughter—has the father come for “her”? The bed on which a naked Lew suggestively reclines is “a sister’s” bed, a deathbed, ­Nicole’s bed invaded by her father, and Rosemary’s bed on which Peterson lies and Dick had reclined. All these elements are present in “More Than Just a House” as the bodies and beds are rearranged in sentences and shapes that would be extended in Tender Is the Night. The doppelganger and the automaton haunted the moderns (Royle 37) and Lew and the Gunther father (“I am him” and “He is coming for me”) replicate, as Royal Dum­phry spectrally comes for Dick as well, while Devereux Warren walks off his death bed.4 Lew then walks the house himself later that night in “broken dreams” (469) like the Gunther father. “More Than Just a House” contains a psychic core of Tender Is the Night in a faded house in which the Gothic life of the Fitzgeralds at La Paix was given full expression. However, Fitzgerald is not through opening his vein of sentimental flow. Jean Gunther says that her father “always does it. . . . Makes the nightly call to see if we’re in bed.” Then it dawns on Lew what might be the structuring of the Gunther relations between father and daughters: “[he] stared at her sharply; a suspicion that had been taking in his subconscious assumed a tangible form.” Yet when the horror of paternal incest intrudes on Lew, Fitzgerald immediately cuts away from the scene to another primal configuration.5 The Gunthers’ upstairs phone suddenly focuses their attention when Bess receives the news that their sister Amanda has died in New York City during childbirth; she flatly informs Lew that “Amanda passed away quietly, giving life to a little boy” (468). The incest is deflected in favor of the narrative of a dead mother having given birth to a son, surely an anagrammatic rearrangement of Fitzgerald’s fantasy of the son saving the dead sisters and thus pleasing the mother. In a complex arrangement of psychic shapes, Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald is perhaps killed and displaced while

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giving birth to the surviving boy (Scott as Lew Lowrie).6 Later that tumultuous night, Lew Lowrie projects himself walking through the Gunther house, which shelters “the broken old, the youth breaking and growing old with it,” and thinks “It’s degenerate business . . . all this hanging on to the past” (469). To label it “degenerate business” is to recall Dick Diver’s estimate of Francisco’s malady as a “hole and corner business” (245) and Dick’s estimate of a young patient as a “bland degenerate offspring” (254); it also suggests Devereux Warren’s self-­labeling of himself to Dohmler as a “goddamned degenerate” (129). Dick Diver himself is descended from a Maryland family (as was Edward Fitzgerald, Scott’s father), “the last hope of a decaying clan” (Tender 300). Additionally, Scott draws on ­Zelda’s family in Montgomery, the popu­larity of the Sayre sisters, and the strong influence of Judge Anthony Sayre on his family.7 In 1933, the Gunther house is “desperately forlorn,” the garden a “jungle,” a broken window in the library. Bess is living on the edge of gentility, her parents and sisters either dead or gone. She has sold off all of the furniture, keeping up a brave appearance. A returning Lew Lowrie queries her:



“What are you doing? What do you expect to happen?” “I was waiting for you, I guess.” “What do you mean?” “You always seemed to turn up.” (473)

This laconic romance patter labels the dynamic as within the “saving” narrative that defines Fitzgerald’s anxious narrative management. Lew immediately proposes marriage and then frames his proposal: “We’ll get married. I don’t know whether I love you—I don’t even know you—I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick” (473). These lines pinpoint Fitzgerald’s strongest anxiety and desire in relation to saving his two dead sisters. He has never “known” them but has acted in bewilderment and compulsion on their behalf, in effect acknowledging “I must always save you who will always be in this house; by extension, I must be responsible for everybody, save everybody, and perhaps become father and mother to myself ”—quite a regimen to “fit in” with being “kind and good as a sentimental hero.” “More Than Just a House” exhibits in raw and simple form what Dick Diver will experience in Tender in richer and more complex forms. The story’s last lines read: “The purpose of the house was achieved—finished and folded—it was an effort toward some commonweal, an effort difficult to estimate, so closely does it press against us still” (475). The purpose of Fitzgerald’s writing is thus achieved in the purpose of the author’s house, “folded” perhaps as a folio or text, a “commonweal” representing the Ameri­can repub­lic and its well being. Fitzgerald’s conclusion to a minor short story is quite

216 / Conclusion

formal and poignant. At one level, it may represent a fantastic wish to leave La Paix with a damaged Z ­ elda somewhat intact, for them to begin anew past all the ghosts that rattled in their houses. However, “pressing against us still” but “difficult to estimate” is the intimation that Fitzgerald is driven by what can hardly be expressed yet will always be lost. “More Than Just a House” is a skeletal narrative of divergent paths toward revelation of Fitzgerald’s primal scene, borrowed from and leavened with the ranks of many sisters and daughters, to best suggest what pressed against his sentimental unconscious. After the mid-­twentieth century, sentiment begins to cohere again as a narrative force and in criti­cal interest toward the extreme consciousness of the anti-­ hero, the putative moral disaster, as well as in the abuse narrative central to identity politics. This structure of a “radical innocence,” however, was never at the center of Fitzgerald’s imagination, and Ameri­can heroes from Ahab to Angstrom were finally inimical to his sentimental and romantic temperament. An oscillation between “my feeling for myself ” and “my feeling for you” as parallactically related committed Fitzgerald to the bold claim of Ameri­can individualism inaugurated by Emerson, “that all history is not only at but for one’s disposal” (Bercovitch 270). Fitzgerald appropriated this vision through his historicizing of character and scene. Dick’s analy­sis on his battlefield tour (57), his perceptions with the Gold Star Mothers (100–01), and his brief history of WWI’s broken universe (245) are brilliant set prose pieces in this vein.8 Dick is a familiar fig­ure of a modernist exceptionalism that extends the Emersonian “I”; Fitzgerald imagines Dick’s sympathetic mind ordering his existence while captured by his­tori­cally significant insight: sentiment stitches together this complex Fitzgeraldian fictional universe. A formidable number of elements were created within the sentimental parallax to be correlated in Fitzgerald’s imagination; for him to finish his novel through so much intelligent paradox was a most impressive accomplishment. It’s probable that Scott Fitzgerald’s imperative to control ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s fiction brought the two sisters to the foreground in Tender Is the Night in a way he had never conceptualized before in his fiction. To complete Tender Is the Night, the writerly ­Zelda had to be safely “dead” and then “recovered” in a parallax view of the non-­writing ­Nicole in the novel’s “solution.” For Fitzgerald and for his hero, this refraction of seeing self-­in-­other occurs in sentiment’s never-­ending paradox for him: how to live and write while being true to his temperament, love of beauty, and belief in the powerful effects of emotion as a first touchstone to being. He then gave back the curve of that complexity in sentiment’s contradictions. Splitting and doubling prevail here, as in so much of Tender’s anagrammar that attempted to solve certain conundrums stalking Fitzgerald as a writer: does Dick “absorb” ­Nicole or does he “cling to his own innards” or can he do both at

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the same time?9 What keeps him “intact” and what might that mean? Here is the writer’s terror as well as that of one part of a writing couple: “where is the space for my work which includes your life, your ego, which I have absorbed?” Fitzgerald in working through Tender Is the Night crafts a testament to unlocking a writer’s block. Sisters’ deaths “that made [him] an author” in his view were always the irregular pieces that challenged and underwrote Fitzgerald’s splicing of ­Nicole’s story with that of ­Zelda’s in the sentimental gap. Fitzgerald was the most talented and relentless of sentimentalists through evocative metaphors for his crises. In so many respects, sentiment may have chosen him. The arc of that chosen sentiment was identified by Fitzgerald in “Babylon Revisited” (1931) when he wrote, “The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life” (224). So easy to be loved—so hard to love. This inclusive quote from the melancholy 1931 Fitzgerald short story about a troubled father and daughter yields an art-­ and-­life trajectory that may be cross-­referenced with the lives of Scott and Z ­ elda and Dick and ­Nicole, as well as the compound family ghosts drifting across the pages of the later Fitzgerald fiction. It is punctuated most firmly in Tender Is the Night which Fitzgerald “tenders” in the blindness of the nightingale’s singing: a song of early childhood and parenting finally completed with a daughter’s violation as well as a doctor’s necessary saving and repeating of a father’s act. An author’s difficult work to do indeed, while “someone to love” (­Zelda, ­Nicole, the sisters) always remains just out of reach. The coda to Tender Is the Night, with Dick wandering through small towns in New York state in ever decreasing respectability as a general practitioner, is the most quotidian definition of who he had been; it is sentimentally devastating for the reader: our hearts “go out” to him. The names of small upstate towns roll past (Batavia, Lockport, Geneva, and Hornell) like names on gravestones. We are reminded of Dick at his best in the cemetery at Beaumont Hamel, coming down from the high of his sentimental disquisition on the origins of World War I to the tearful “red-­haired girl from Tennessee” (a cousin perhaps to our red-­headed hero and to Francis Melarky whose father is in prison in Knoxville), who has “come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave” (58). She may be a resurrected Fitzgerald/Diver sister looking for “Francis” who is “buried” in the novel. Dick saves the moment by gently suggesting “if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name” (58)—he would definitely be in one grave or another, as Dick is in “one town or another” in the novel’s concluding sentence. Such displaced facts and naming give Tender Is the Night its tantaliz-

218 / Conclusion

ing intricacy in an anagrammar of parts. Dick’s “dying fall” through small-­town New York state is uncannily similar to the regression of a Benjamin Button, becoming smaller and smaller as an integer in the Ameri­can landscape, until reaching something like a pre-­birth, thus re-­sentimentalizing Dick’s fate for the reader. To come one last time to the sentimental punctuation shaping the key scenes in Tender Is the Night is to determine how Fitzgerald could articulate both the “rare” and “vicious” strains of feeling that so influenced his creation of emotion in the parallax construction of self and other.10 Žižek believes we are “confined to the interplay of the (inconsistent) multitude of appearances—more radically to the properly Hegelian one” of “how does appearance itself emerge from the interplay of the Real?” He posits two views: (1) the Real is just the cut, the gap of inconsistency between two appearances, and (2) the Real is a supplement of the opposite: “appearance is the cut, the gap between the two Reals, or more precisely, “something that emerges in the gap that separates the Real from itself ” (PV 106). However one might theorize the gap in which sentiment orders emotion, its fraught setting yielded the death of love that called out for redress in Fitzgerald’s fiction, for a turning back with heart going out: so easy to be loved—so hard to love. Having lost the thread of Tender Is the Night over the years, having subjected his manuscripts to continual experiment and gone deep into personal pain, Fitzgerald had to write through sentiment as a sec­ond ordering of emotion and feeling and then constantly subject it to severe scrutiny. Such is my sentimental conclusion about sentiment’s power for him in both a personal and authorial sense. Those early met and loved who needed Dick fuel his tenuous sentimental conclusion about his best self, but this conclusion is overturned by Dum­phry return­ ing the incestuous father, binding and reminding Dick that he is also this fig­ure. This brutal and immediate confluence of roles in Tender Is the Night is barbarous knowledge for its hero and author and best demonstrates how Scott Fitzgerald could honestly address the paradoxes of sentiment within his desiring imagination. He finished his novel through sentiment’s multiple generations of apparent and real. ­Zelda was lost to him, his sisters were irretrievable. Tender Is the Night was not.

Notes

Introduction 1. Keats famously conceived of negative capability in a letter to his brothers (12/21/ 1817): “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates every other consideration” (Bush, John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters 261). 2. Contemporary interest in affect is a mighty attempt to articulate emotion prior to sentiment’s thrall, back toward the autonomic sources of our bodily intensities, pre-­ narrativization. See Brian Massumi and Silvan Tomkins. 3. Philip Fisher writes, “The sentiments, in other words, do not rename the set of problems posed by earlier discussions of the passions; rather, they install an entirely new geography of the self around self-­love, sympathy for others, and the motives of the active will in its endeavor to keep existing.” He adds, “The feelings, the affections, the sentiments, and the passions are not alternative ways of talking about the same matters but language used in the service of quite distinct politics of the inner life” (The Vehement Passions ­40–41). 4. See James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy, pp.152–53, for a brief informed history of the emergence of the word “sentimental.” 5. Žižek doesn’t allow for the history of the text’s production in real time, according to Fitzgerald’s personal or his­tori­cal constraints, nor does Žižek comment on the integrity of the novel’s composition with each element following the pathways laid out by successive drafts. The 1951 Scribner’s version edited by Malcolm Cowley straightened out Tender’s chronology and became a more familiar male melodrama for Dr. Diver, which served criti­cal interests foregrounding the male’s anxiety and defeat. That’s a power move that our contemporary criti­cal climate and I myself largely reject as male dominant and

220 / Notes to Pages 5–13 exclusionary regarding the text Fitzgerald wrote and his intent. I’m more interested in bringing out Fitzgerald’s thematics of mourning and melancholy regarding women and the sexual politics determining his maternal and paternal imaginaries through sentiment. For Cowley and Scribner’s in 1951 to ultimately opt for the tragi-­romantic male hero was a misreading of the essential sentimental drama of the novel’s genesis and development. See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “Sober Second Thoughts.” 6. Brian Massumi writes of “a redundancy of resonation” and “a redundancy of signification” “that plays out or linearizes (jumps the feedback loop) between vital function and meaning into lines of socially valorized action and reaction” (26). Such rhetoric moves the study of affect into congruence with sentiment in narrative. These “redundancies” are affect’s dynamics which, in another semantic row, initiate the linear progression yielding narrative and sentiment, and sharing with affect, the same feedback systems of resonance but at the characterological level. 7. Žižek concludes that “the status of the Real” is “purely parallactic,” for “the parallax Real is thus opposed to the (standard) Lacanian notion of the Real” and confronted “through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions” in a Moebius strip (27, 29). He quotes Thomas Metzinger to the effect that “We do not experience the contents of our self-­consciousness as the contents of a representational process . . . but simply as ourselves, living in the world right now” (PV 214), perhaps the clearest set of lifeworld conditions in which sentiment flourishes. 8. Massumi offers a blueprint for the extension of affect into sentiment at several junctures in Parables for the Virtual. His definitions dart among levels and states to recreate through language, the effects of affect, to find a vocabulary for their deployment in cultural theory. Fitzgerald’s commitment to render beauty in his fiction is a structurally similar attempt to wrest affect into language in the generic interplay of romance and realism. Sentiment was his most powerful vehicle through meaning circuits we both intimately feel and learn from in his work. 9. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” suggested Jung. Sentimentality curries your favor in a seductive transaction by demanding your tears and total allegiance, drawing on your fund of expendable capital while canceling your emotional ­control. 10. Shaftesbury’s “aesthetic epistemology” (qtd. in Chandler 235), yields the following: “the very actions themselves and the affections of pity, kindness, gratitude and their contraries, being brought into the mind by reflection, become objects. So that by means of this reflected sense, there arises another kind of affection toward these very affections themselves, which have been already felt and have now become the subject of a new liking or dislike” (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury 172). Such a dynamic richly theorizes Dick Diver’s battlefield cemetery speech in Tender (56–59). See Chapter 1. 11. As Jameson writes of historicity, the struggle that is any finished novel “regenerates itself out of its own impossibility, taking the latter as the content of narration renewed” (Marxism and Form 352). 12. For Barthes in the “empty signifier,” the concept fills the form. Gloria is the symbol for cheapness in the audience; they too consume her in desire. By critiquing the myth,

Notes to Pages 13–25 / 221 Gloria understands the process. She is her own “mythologist” while Anthony is a “myth consumer” and is not “cynical” or “demystifying”; as “the reader,” he “lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (Mythologies 128). 13. Curnutt references Dick Diver and his swells of emotion, the lyrical inquiry into feelings, and the golden girl as a symbol of attainment for the Romantics. He notes that Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy) was Fitzgerald’s working title for The Beautiful and Damned where “the protagonist is seduced by a vision of feminine beauty whose evanescence prostrates him with sorrow” (Cambridge 98). 14. Curnutt concludes that Fitzgerald in Tender finally settled on a “startling juxtaposition” of “omniscient and modernist narrative styles” that was “wholly unique” (“A Unity Less Conventional” 124).

Chapter 1 1. See Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood.” Baym’s landmark essay surveys both the establishment of the Ameri­can canon and its criti­cal preceptors and locates the central trope of the beleaguered male whose crisis defines fictional characters, authors, and critics in a reenforcing rhetoric. 2. Chandler discusses at length Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), with particular reference to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Chandler tropes on “moving” as “shifting perspectives” and “being moved” as “registering new feeling,” that the action of a scene of­ten “takes place in a medium of crossing viewpoints, a space of sentiment” in “a medium that is itself defined by a field of virtual spectators and their ‘views’”—“that is, by vari­ous lines of sight, some of them crossing, some of them matching, some of them reciprocated, some of them not” (174–75). As Chapter 1 will show in several close readings, Fitzgerald is thoroughly conversant with such “moving”— at the Diver dinner party (Tender 34), Dick’s battlefield speech (56–59), the screening of ­Rosemary’s Daddy’s Girl (69), and Dick’s siting the Gold Star Mothers (100–01). 3. Philip Fisher comments that sentiments “install an entirely new geography of the self around self-­love, sympathy for others, and the motives of the active will”; sentiment provides the capacity “to imagine oneself in another state while enjoying the state that one is in as a result of that act of imagination” (The Vehement Passions 40–42). Sentiment is thus not a passion or a “truth” but rather always relational, always feeling about a passion such as ones Fisher names (anger, fear, shame, grief, or wonder) (22, 26). 4. Francis Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) wrote the enormously popu­lar Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), My Secret Garden (1911), and The Little Princess (1905), surely the most “vicious tract” in her canon to Fitzgerald, and an obvious prototype for Rosemary’s film Daddy’s Girl. See Chapter 9. 5. At a large Fitzgerald house party at Ellerslie in Delaware on May 21, 1927, the Fitzgeralds and their guests, picnicking on the river, all looked up at the sky upon learning that Charles Lindbergh had landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Le Bourget field outside Paris. Lois Moran and her mother were guests there (prototypes for Rosemary and her mother, Mrs. Elsie Speers). They all were “looking up in great excitement,” according to

222 / Notes to Pages 27–32 Lois Moran’s memory (Cline 207–08). Perhaps this is what fueled Fitzgerald’s “patriotic” party scene, why the guests “floated up” into the stars? 6. Fisher writes that “wonder, the most neglected of primary aesthetic experiences within modernity, involves the aestheticization of delight or of the pleasure principle” (2) and that “philosophy begins in wonder” (10). He continues, “many elements of wonder are . . . the sudden, the unexpected, the all-­at-­once of the visual, a first-­time experience, a rare or even singular event, a progression from mystification to explanation, a feeling of the freshness of the world” (Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences 26–27). 7. Elaine Scarry defines “rarity” as where “we shall begin at a place where the mental image and the piece of the world being represented are aligned as virtually identical because both are nearly weightless: in other words, with objects that are solid but so emptied of solidity that they appear airy, rare” (89). Scarry conceives of the way acting on a mental image is to first compose it, then aggressively subtract it away (Dreaming by the Book 102). Fitzgerald analogously believed that the “rarer atmosphere of sentiment” could only be breathed “irreverently,” as if it were almost blasphemous; hence, the Diver party table that “broke up” is indeed Scarry’s “subtraction.” 8. Gerald Murphy writes a 1925 letter to Scott remembering the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys in the Murphys’ Villa America garden: “we were happy whenever we were with you. My God how rare it is. How rare” (LeVot 209). Fitzgerald thus purloins Gerald’s sentimental letter for “rarer atmosphere” and affixes the object noun of “sentiment” to the Diver party scene at the “Villa Diana.” 9. Dick’s history lesson is an ambitious author’s example of modernism’s reshaping of the fragments of the Victorian century and is uncannily expressed by Fredric Jameson when he describes what might be Dick’s performance at the cemetery: “the modernist paradigm is most of­ten staged in the terms of the pathos of the museum or the library, the sheer weight of the cultural past, some excess of literature and its dead texts which by way of a kind of fatigued and disabused sophistication ultimately provoke the dialectical reversal of a coming to awareness” (“The Ideology of the Text” 65). 10. Amory suggests that “the sentimental person thinks things will last” while “the romantic person hopes against hope they won’t” (This Side of Paradise 177) and has “desperate confidence they won’t last” (229). 11. In John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field,” stanzas three and four read: Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. (Fussell 249–50) 12. Amory Blaine states flatly that “Sentiment is emotional” (Paradise 177), sec­onding John Gardner’s view that “sentiment is emotion and feeling itself,” simple as that. Senti-

Notes to Pages 32–36 / 223 mentality is “emotion or feeling that rings false” (The Art of Fiction 115). Recognizing sentiment as against sentimentality from the writer’s point-­of-­view is always an on-­going question of taste and writerly sensibility. 13. At its fictional best, the sentimental validation depends on the sign of a moral foundation and defines a virtuous character. In Dickens’ Bleak House, Esther Summerson’s heart going out to a number of people in specific need defines her heroism, rather than Mrs. Jellyby’s brutal philanthropy. The death of a poor mother’s baby in an early scene (Chapter 8) and the simple grief that two mothers subsequently share are allowed to remain private by Esther and by Dickens. 14. “There she was” may stand as an example of what Scarry calls the mental picture of “radiant ignition,” which stresses light against a background heralding a coming (Dreaming by the Book 71). Fitzgerald of­ten ignites a sharp sentimental peroration with such an extended image—the Diver dinner table (Tender 34), the World War I troops and their empires “walking backwards” over “a million bloody rugs (bodies)” (57). Of course, the most famous radiant image of “There she [is]” in modern fiction would be Virginia Woolf ’s final words on Clarissa Dalloway (1925). 15. There actually was a film entitled Daddy’s Girl (1918), written by Henry King for Baby Marie Osborne. She was Balboa Studio’s main attraction and appears as a smiling cherub naked from the waist up in publicity photos. A favorite with WWI movie audiences, she retired (!) in 1919 at age 8. She appeared in 22 films but only Little Mary Sunshine survives. Osborne registered as an extra (1935–49), appeared in numerous films, and then became a costumer (1954–77). In Little Mary Sunshine, she watches her mother die after an attack by her drunken father and then wanders in rags and sleeps in cars. Discovered by a rich man who has recently become estranged from his fiancée, she is taken to his home where he “brightens her life.” I am grateful to Elsa Mitsoglou for the initial reference of Osborne. 16. Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs (1912) is an epistolary novel in which our orphaned heroine is sent to college by an unknown benefactor whom she addresses in her letters only as “Dear Daddy Long Legs.” At novel’s end, he stands revealed and they are united as man and wife. Molly, from the 1910 novel by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott and a 1916 film, is a poor young woman in the city who makes her living writing letters for lovelorn and heartsick people and through her work finally meets her dream husband. The ubiquitous Mary Pickford starred in Daddy Long Legs in 1919; a popu­lar remake as a talkie was made with Janet Gaynor in 1931, and Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire cranked up the vehicle with a French twist one more time in 1955. 17. Shirley Temple Black was impressed enough by an association with Fitzgerald to quote verbatim his letters in her 1988 autobiography, reading right past Fitzgerald’s over-­ familiar tone of blunt criticism; she’d presumably heard all the “nauseating” appraisals before, presumably. She also included publicity stills of herself as a five-­year-­old taxi dancer called “Morelegs Sweetrick” and with Joel McCrea and Irving S. Cobb who either stare straight ahead wishing to be elsewhere or wonder where to put their hands. 18. Gilles Deleuze writes of a putative sentimental coercion in which “the other side of generality to which sympathy invites us is partiality,” that it is an “inequality of affec-

224 / Notes to Pages 37–38 tion” that “sympathy bestows upon us as a characteristic of our nature” (Empiricism and Subjectivity 38). Deleuze then cites Hume noting that such excess may “make us regard any remarkable transgression of such a degree of partiality, either by too great an enlargement, or contraction of the affections, as vicious and immoral” (38, qtd. in Hume, Treatise 488). Fitzgerald uncannily uses “vicious” in precisely Hume’s meaning to describe the overwhelming affect of the huge screen image of Rosemary in Daddy’s Girl. 19. Rosemary’s mother Mrs. Elsie Speers is a candidate for a displaced Gold Star Mother. Twice a widow (12) by an army doctor and cavalry officer husband (Major Mosby?), she watches beside death beds (25) and has a fading prettiness (3). Dick and Mrs. Speers both possess qualities of frontier mothers and at times merge into one identity. In Dick’s goodbye scene with Elsie Speers, he’s aware “of her full charm” as she would wait for her man “to get through a battle or an operation” (165). 20. Bakhtin writes that in the novel, a discourse of pathos is almost always a surrogate for some other genre that is no longer available (394). Dick’s father talks to his son of the dashing romantic Mosby and Dick gives parties that he impulsively analogizes to war (Tender 27) and describes war as a “love battle” (57). In early March 1863, Confederate Captain John Mosby with his irregulars captured North­ern Brigadier General E. H. Stoughton in his bed at his field headquarters, together with two officers, thirty men, and fifty-­eight horses. He then took him back through battle lines to deliver the captives to Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew (Foote, Fredericksburg to Meridian 244–45). Mosby was a former Virginia lawyer who wore thigh-­high boots, a red cape, an ostrich plume, and was utterly fearless (Foote, From Red River to Appomattox 804–06). 21. Fitzgerald has Dick Diver intuit something of Benjamin’s analy­sis of the Angel when he speaks of the WWI armies and the century’s love of middle-­class love, “a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day” (57). In a draft of his thesis nine, Benjamin wrote, “the visionary glance is lit up by the rapidly departing past” (Werckmeister 257). Most ominously, Dick senses the link of his compulsive charm to his­tori­cal violence: “He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust” (27). George Toles writes of “Dick’s future-­tense nervous fatigue” as he “tries to gaze back upon a vibrant passion while the latter is still taking form” (430). 22. Butler writes, “Power that appears as external is ‘pressed upon’ the subject. . . . The form this power takes is relentlessly marked by a fig­ure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself ” (The Psychic Life of Power 3). Peter Brooks states that for modernists, it’s the “selectivity of consciousness applied to the phenomenal world, and the establishment of a perspective resolutely within consciousness as it deals with the objects of the world” (The Realist Vision 208), also concluding that “a psychological criticism may gauge the “tropology of the perversities through which we turn back, turn around, the simple consumption of texts, making their reading a worthy object of analy­ sis” (Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling 34). 23. Žižek comments in The Parallax View that “the frame is always-­already redoubled: the frame within reality is always linked to another frame enframing ‘reality’ itself ” (29).

Notes to Pages 40–46 / 225 Thus the “gap” is immediately complicated, refracted-­into-­itself by sentimental memories that then frame the women at table—the Gold Star Mothers framed by a vision of Victorian women as the best of the age, reframed through Dick’s father and tales of Mosby, and finally reframed by ­Nicole and Rosemary’s presence. 24. Vincent Adiutori has written to the author, “Massumi uses the metaphor of a feedback loop to describe how affect travels between registers.” Massumi could be describing refraction itself, where “affect is the concomitance of time and cognition through the body.” Is this not sentiment as repalpated in Eve Sedgwick’s terms? Adiutori cites George Gibbs that “at the heart of mimesis is affect contagion, the bioneurological means by which particular affects are transmitted from body to body.” Such rhetoric if applied to sentiment could make it sound like a spreading plague: mass sentimental response would equal contagion. 25. Jameson conceives of “the vertical demonstration of some identical mechanism at work on all the levels of discourse and expressing itself at some points as action, at others taking the form of an image, at still others being articulated as a psychological perception or a stylistic mannerism” (The Prison-­House of Language 127). I’m calling sentiment that demonstration of a mechanism on these multiple levels and points in Tender Is the Night.

Chapter 2 1. Jonathan Schiff has researched the Fitzgerald sister’s death records. Eldest sister Louise Scott Fitzgerald died June 13, 1896, age three, a date that fell three months before Scott’s birth on Sep­tem­ber 24, 1896. His sec­ond eldest sister, Mary Ashton Fitzgerald died No­vem­ber 25, 1895, age 17 months, both after an “illness.” Schiff suggests that the ten-­month gap between Mary Ashton’s death and Scott’s birth suggest that he was a “replacement” child, also christened with Louise’s middle name of “Scott” (21). 2. Schiff “locate[s] Dick’s incestuous counter-­transference within his overwhelming desire to rescue others in mourning, a desire fostered by the deaths of his two sisters” (118). Schiff is interested more in cataloguing Dick’s behavior with regard to Fitzgerald’s parents’ “unresolved grief ” that severely complicated their relationship with him. Schiff concludes that it fostered “the culturally unmanly role of empathizing with others’ grief ” (22). I make Fitzgerald’s empathy a cornerstone of my remarks on sentiment. Schiff notes the rescue fantasy was first identified by Jeffrey Berman (Schiff 118). Berman cites the scene with Francisco and Dum­phry and Dick’s need to be loved so intensely, to both engulf and be engulfed in a rescue fantasy (The Talking Cure, 72). Schiff in an extended note (158) surveys the identification of Fitzgerald’s “two sisters” by Bruccoli, Donaldson, ­Meyers, and Mellow. 3. I am indebted to Elsa Mitsoglou for this insight. Consider Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button, too, as this “little mute being” of no true recollection who at last fades out: “And his white crib . . . and the dim faces that moved above him . . . and the warm sweet aroma of the milk . . . faded out altogether from his mind” (“Benjamin Button” 119). The need to mourn, save, or become the vulnerable child may be seen in its potential danger to male identity by referencing the personal and professional estrangement Freud

226 / Notes to Pages 49–53 felt in the early 1930s from Sandor Ferenczi, his long-­time colleague. Ferenczi in Freud’s view, by allying himself with the hurt child, was becoming “unmanly,” and that “the need to cure and to help had become paramount” (Masson 167). Fitzgerald creates Dick Diver precisely in that stance of seeking both the maternal role and the maternal nurture he had been denied. 4. When ­Nicole suspects Dick of eyeing his young female patients, his prescient rejoinder is “I don’t like ickle durls. . . . When I dance with them, I feel as if I’m pushing a baby carriage” (Tender 172). With his (and Fitzgerald’s) two baby sisters, perhaps? ­Zelda’s older sister Rosalind Sayre and Sara Murphy’s sister, Hoytie Wiborg, are among the models for Baby Warren (Vaill 233). Rosemary “Hoyt” might be said to take what’s left from “Hoytie” as a name. 5. The creaky plot line of Broadway Melody is a story based on the careers of Vivian and ­Rosetta Duncan, a vaudeville sister act, and hinges on two young sisters, Hank and Q ueenie Mahoney, who bring their dreams to New York City, where they hope to crash into musicals as a two-woman song-­and-­dance team. They fall for the same guy; one sister is “spunky,” one is “smart.” 6. Fitzgerald resented his mother Mollie living at times in a child’s fantasy world and reading novels borrowed from the pub­lic library instead of attending to her housework (Levot 14). Mollie Fitzgerald noted in her scrapbook, “Louise and Mary’s little brother [Scott] made his first attempt to walk and it seems as if they were nearer” (Schiff 33, qtd. in Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love 16). Is this perhaps where Scott gets the idea that Mrs. Johnston doesn’t know her author son’s name in “An Author’s Mother”? These deceased daughters seem just as alive to Mollie as her living son, while Mrs. Johnston dresses in black crepe, as did Mollie. 7. In Cary’s “The Sisters,” Rebecca Hadly is a doomed fifteen-­year-­old character based on Cary’s sister Rhoda. Rebecca relates her worldview, a textbook sentimental account of loving nature, death, and mourning. She could be the dead sister reaching back to family from beyond the grave, a familiar fig­ure to Mollie Fitzgerald and perhaps to her son: “The world is full of bruised and crushed hearts and desolate spirits; moans of sorrow creep vein-­like through the sunshine, and underlie the laughter” (“The Sisters” 64). 8. Fetterley comments that many Alice Cary stories present a mother fig­ure who gives herself over completely to a male child, despite the fact he may be incompetent, lazy, and egocentric. The mother encourages him and excuses his faults, while denying herself and her other children (xxv). Fetterley relates the plot of Cary’s “Why Molly Root Gets Married” in which a fading single woman basically lives in her attic museum “where she recol­ lects herself by sorting through her things, keeps alive in a hostile environment her self-­ respect.” Such is “Molly’s museum” and then she is forced into marriage (xxxiii). Cary’s view of Molly could pass for a vision of Mollie Fitzgerald as related by her son Scott. These tropes of aging women, attics, and memories could very well have helped fuel Fitzgerald’s imagination to create “Author’s House” and “An Author’s Mother” in the summer of 1936. Perhaps Scott Fitzgerald is the one who requested and checked out Clovernook Sketches and the Cary sisters’ poems from “the library.” 9. The two sisters here in effect silence a third sister directly before two more sisters—­

Notes to Pages 54–59 / 227 Nicole and Dick’s Eczema Woman patient—assume Tender’s stage. The lives of the musician sisters lead to a death in life while the death of the Fitzgerald-­Diver baby sisters lead to literary accomplishment. 10. Edward Fitzgerald had two sisters, as did his wife, Mollie. Scott respected his father’s sister, Eliza Delihant, “for trying to provide him with discipline” (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur 18). 11. An abridged one-­act play by ­Nicole Cridland: Authors’ story conference between Scott and Z ­ elda with (no) apologies to Stephen King and The Shining: Scott. Wait, here’s a good one. Instead of taking place on the Riviera, your novel will take place in the mountains of Switzerland . . . in a ski chalet. You are there with your husband for the winter. He has taken the role of innkeeper. He fig­ures the quiet and isolation will allow him to finish the novel he has been working on for the past seven years. Scott clenches his fists. But no, the peace and quiet does not help and he descends into alcoholism and madness—a madness that can’t be satisfied until he kills his wife and child! ­Zelda. Scott, are you alright? Scott. Yes, I can see it now. I see the little child whirring around the endless, labyrinthine halls of the chalet on a little tricycle. Suddenly he is stopped by two sullen sisters holding hands and softly pleading, “come play with us.” But he can’t, you see, because they’re dead! Scott puts his hands to his face and makes a sobbing noise. ­Zelda. You and your two sisters again! 12. Other lines from Tender may buttress Rosemary and her mother as handmaidens to the two sisters imaginary. One of Mrs. Speers’ husbands was a cavalry officer (a Major Mosby, perhaps?), and one an “army doctor” (Dick Diver?) (12). Mrs. Speers had watched beside a couple of death beds (perhaps akin to Fitzgerald daughters and sisters) (25). Finally, Dick says to Rosemary in the darkness after his party, “You don’t know what you want. You go and ask your mother what you want” (38), which is akin to Fitzgerald telling Rosemary as his avatar to go speak to the(ir) mother. 13. They conclusively add another reason why the Fitzgerald-­Cowley version of Tender (1938, 1951) is a failed attempt to restore a more conventional male melodrama that is downhill all the way for its hero: it does not do justice to the gendered complexity of Fitzgerald’s desiring imagination. 14. Dick flirts earlier in the novel with Mrs. Speers as well. He’s aware of her “full charm.” Would Dick rather be Mrs. Speers’ son or her lover? She’s lost two husbands and has a seventeen-­year-­old daughter. If she’s “fortyish,” she’s only five or six years older than Dick, while he is ten years older than ­Nicole. Dick concludes “she meant rather more to him than merely a last, unwillingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary” (165). 15. Žižek’s example centers on the two published versions of the novel (1934, 1951) and how neither one accounts for the gap of time in the life history of the Divers. He

228 / Notes to Pages 59–65 comments that Dick “leads his life in order to satisfy [the subject’s] gaze,” that “there is no direct immanent line of development from the prehistory to glitzy story proper: the jump is irreducible here, a different dimension intervenes.” For Fitzgerald, “prehistory” would include the years of Tender manuscripts that bring the novel only up to the Paris scenes in Book One and the story proper would be the dreadful time of ­Zelda’s sanitarium life transformed into ­Nicole’s tragedy. The jump from the “present” in 1929 to the “past” (1917) is convincing, says Žižek; however, the return to the present time in the novel later in Book Two (Tender 162ff.) is not artistically justified, and “doesn’t work” (PV 9 ). 16. Lukacher calls for a “larger frame of reference for the primal scene” than earliest sexual trauma, finally calling it “the fig­ure of the dilemma of interpretation” itself (331). Thus did Fitzgerald create around that “fig­ure” of the two sisters the root of his writer’s sentimentalism.

Chapter 3 1. See especially Richard Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction; Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon; and Milton R. Stern, The Golden Moment. 2. Butler writes that the “symbolic . . . is to be understood as an ideal and universal set of cultural laws that govern kinship and signification” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 198–99). Fitzgerald negotiates a gendered performativity to deftly depict what Butler would call “a reiteration of norms or set of norms” in regulating the practices of sexual regimes (12). 3. Fitzgerald himself was a fetching showgirl in a Triangle Club publicity photograph at Princeton in 1915 and later dressed convincingly in drag at a ball in Minneapolis ( James 11–12, 27–28). 4. Katherine Cummings writes that Fitzgerald’s transference generates a number of uncanny effects, the chief being that “each thing begins to look like some other thing so that all things seem akin—that is, proximate and approximately the same. A family” (269). Cummings is effective in teasing out the Freudian architecture of Tender’s plot, particularly in reference to the Melarky Manuscript drafts. She is less certain of her readings of the novel, stating that Dick accidentally “bumps into” Devereux Warren in Lausanne (251) and that ­Zelda “coincidentally” has eczema like Dick’s suffering patient (278). 5. Alex Wulff has written to the author that Dick is thus “trying on a fetish,” one that Freud discusses as a substitute for “the mother’s penis” that had been important to the small boy in early childhood, that he had once “believed in.” 6. McKisco’s two exclamations—“Well, if that isn’t a pansy’s trick!” and “Oh, I beg your pardon”—have uncanny twinned scenes in The Great Gatsby. First, the sexually ambiguous McKee is admonished to keep his hands off the elevator lever, as he rides down with Nick from Myrtle’s party; he replies, “I beg your pardon . . . I didn’t know I was touching it,” immediately before Fitzgerald cuts to the strange scene of McKee sitting on a bed while Nick stands watching him display his “portfolio” (37–38). When Nick is exclaiming to a man at Gatsby’s party that he has no idea who Gatsby is, “I’m Gatsby,” the man replies, to which Nick blurts out, “Oh, I beg your pardon.” Gatsby then says, “I thought you knew, old sport.” Nick then enters an extended reverie about Gatsby in which he is both

Notes to Pages 66–69 / 229 charmed and repulsed by him, admiring his “rare” smiles that “vanish” and then Gatsby becomes a “young roughneck” (48). Nick’s masculine crush and resultant anxiety about Gatsby oscillate, as do Dick’s view of Francisco and Dum­phry (Tender 245–46); Jordan Baker pointedly asks Nick, “having a gay time now?” (Gatsby 48). Nick goes on to laud Gatsby’s “rare smile” of “eternal reassurance” with much of the adulation that Dum­phry lavishes on Dick in Lausanne. 7. Ruth Prigozy invaluably analyzes in detail a number of early Hollywood films (particularly those by D. W. Griffith), with the young girl heroine and touches on several of the sexual issues Fitzgerald would embody in Tender through Rosemary and Daddy’s Girl (Prigozy, “From Griffith’s Girls to Daddy’s Girl: The Masks of Innocence in Tender Is the Night”). 8. Is Abe North also implicated in Tender’s scenes with gay males? In the first version of the Diver Manuscript, between Rosemary’s disgust and Campion’s reply about Abe, Fitzgerald inserted a halting (and then crossed-­out) beginning to an explanation by Campion who was to say, “I knew it was that Abe—I knew how he’d been—and I knew was drunk and I knew Royal and—” (81, emphasis mine). In the novel, Dum­phry is never mentioned by name in the scene. In the Diver Manuscript, Campion appears to be suggesting that Abe and Dum­phry had an encounter, fueled by Abe’s drunkenness and perhaps Dum­phry then came on to him. Alternatively, was there something between Campion and Abe, not Dum­phry and Abe? A momentary pass? Abe comes out of the hotel “somewhat distracted” (42). Abe’s putative encounter with Dum­phry gives more credence to his derision at Campion’s weeping (42). In the manuscript, Abe’s “face hardened until to [Rosemary] it was ugly” (mss. 82), making him repulsive, as is Campion to ­Rosemary. Thus when Abe asks Rosemary what the “sewing circle member” has told her, Abe may be asking, “what has he told you about Dum­phry and me,” not about the coming “duel.” In the manuscript, Campion nervously explains to Abe that he told Rosemary “only one part, only one part” (mss. 84): does he mean, “I didn’t tell her about you and me and Dum­ phry”? Inquiring readers want to know. Rosemary can’t understand why Abe is treating Campion so badly. Rosemary surmises, “maybe [Campion’s] sad about something,” and Abe says, “Maybe he is” (Tender 43). However, Abe in the manuscript comes close to explaining to Rosemary why he treats Campion badly when he replies, “‘I treat him badly because’—He paused, and looked at her and suddenly became almost tender, ‘you’re a hell of a nice girl,’ he said” (mss. 85). The switch precisely mirrors Campion in the published novel (41); Abe here similarly stops in mid-­sentence about Dum­phry to save Rosemary’s sensibilities. 9. In the Dick Diver Manuscripts, McKisco on shipboard engages in sexual double entendres with Dick who is having a drink with a young alcoholic Yalie named Curly from Minneapolis (a holdover character from the Melarky-­Kelly manuscripts) whom he wants to get into his clinic in Switzerland. “Drumming up trade?” McKisco asks “maliciously,” while Dick answers, “How would you like to be in his position?” (Second Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 221). 10. When Arthur Mizener in 1951 revised the standard Scribner’s edition of T ­ ender into the chronological order of the story in accordance with Fitzgerald’s wishes from

230 / Notes to Pages 71–72 the late 1930s, he appended a section from the Melarky Manuscripts, which he entitled “Wanda Breasted.” Francis Melarky pursues Wanda in Paris through a frustrating evening in which she is enamored of several young women and also flirts with both Francis and suicide. In the published Tender, the husk of the evening remains with the three “cobra women” and the young girl who begins to “play up” to Rosemary (72–73). Francis’s anger and Wanda’s disinterest and desperation are smoothed out in Tender into Rosemary’s need to be saved from lesbians by Dick’s suave intervention. 11. Robert Wexelblatt states that Dick’s origi­nal error may be in conceiving a professional situation as a personal one. Abe pointedly tells Dick at the WWI battlefield that he wants to hand his “love battle” to D. H. Lawrence (57). Lawrence conceives in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) of an Ameri­can ideal for men: “Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many ­feelings— nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the origi­nal role of woman” (Lawrence 96 qtd. in Wexelblatt 386). 12. Chandler well describes the “inward sentiment” that defines Dick Diver’s reflection on “carrying the egos” when he writes of “the dual sense of reflection that combines seeing oneself in the eyes of another, with the act of looking into our own hearts” (142). Dick shifts to a register of sympathy that redoubles his intimation of Francisco and charm. Chandler invokes sentiment’s eighteenth-century origins when he writes, “an impression (which is affective) leaves behind a (cognitive) trace or image of itself that Hume calls an idea. . . . These ideas can return to strike us again, in memory or imagination, to create a sec­ond-­order affective experience. The impression of reflection is Hume’s term for this sec­ond order phenomenon, so crucial to Hume’s moral sense analy­sis” (172). Žižek in The Parallax View comments that the lack of a fixed socio-­ethical frame of reference, “far from simply condemning us to moral relativism, opens up a new ‘higher’ field of ethical experience, that of intersubjectivity, of the mutual dependence of subjects, of the need not only to rely on others, but also to recognize the ethical weight of others’ claims on me” (126). 13. The homeostatic balance that becomes so elusive for Dick Diver as others “press up close”—Rosemary (64), ­Nicole (155), Dum­phry (245–46)—and he attempts to counter through his own sentimental absorption of them. Žižek labels such balance “homoestatic” in a scientific adumbration of the “status of emotions” in the Freudian Unconscious to brain science where “emotions display the ‘spontaneous’ reaction of an organism to an encounter with an object which disturbs the organism’s ‘homeostatic balance’” (PV 229). Consider how obsessed Fitzgerald is with maintaining Dick’s “balance—on the flying rings at Yale (Tender 116), in his almost-­seduction of Rosemary when he loses “the tensile strength of his balance” (65), and on the water ski board (284–85). 14. See Freud’s “Letter to an Ameri­can mother” (1935), in which he writes, “I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. . . . Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by certain arrest of sexual development” (787). Such an early view did not, of course, stem the tide of decades of promised “cures” by all manner of therapists acting in the name of sexual and

Notes to Pages 73–75 / 231 other “science.” In contemporary parlance, such efforts are labeled as biopo­liti­cal management of targeted groups. 15. Dick’s interview with Francisco exists in the “totality of the refractions” as Fitzgerald writes of the reflecting surfaces in Rosemary’s Paris hotel room (Tender 109). Similarly, the Diver Manuscripts scrutinized ­Nicole’s final condition after Dick takes his leave from the Riviera: “Meanwhile everyone who knew ­Nicole was so very sorry for her that she became really happy and everything turned inside out disclosing such a new lining that it seemed as if her future life would have such a logical background as never was (Third Version Dick Diver Manuscripts 613). Such rhetoric “mirrors” Dick’s epiphany in Lausanne but is sardonic and syntactically fractured, a provisional sentimentality in which the visual field made “logical” is not enough. Fitzgerald cut these lines in the published novel: they would not describe ­Nicole’s “broken universe.” 16. Žižek writes of desire and drive, “The key is provided by Lacan’s clarification, in his Seminar XI that the essential feature of the scopic drive consists in ‘making oneself seen [se faire voir].’” Such is not to be confused with the narcissistic “looking at oneself through the other . . . from the point of the Ego-­ideal in the Other, in the form in which I appear to myself worthy of love” (Žižek, Interrogating the Real 148). Fitzgerald radically exposes Dick to the “idea” of channeling Francisco’s charm. Dick’s feelings and impressions change instantly when charm is embodied by the wrong gay character; Dum­phry hustles him, perhaps thinking that Dick seated with Francisco is now fair game. Dick seeks to know his own riddle from a safe vantage point with Francisco but through Dum­phry’s interrogation, he becomes “visible” as a substitute father fig­ure, husband, rapist, and gay male, for “the scopic drive always designates such a closing of the loop whereby I get caught in the picture I’m looking at” (Žižek, Interrogating the Real 151). What Žižek then calls the “shadowy double” (154) is indeed Fitzgerald’s return of all the valences of Devereaux Warren to Dick Diver and to Tender Is the Night. 17. Ronald Berman in “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald Murphy, and the New Arts,” FSF Review 7 2009, quotes John Dewey that “we may be aware of meanings, may achieve ideas that unite wide and enduring scope with richness of distinctions. The latter sort of ­consciousness . . . takes up into itself meanings covering stretches of existence wrought into consistency. . . . The idea is, in short, art and a work of art” (Dewey, “The Metaphysics of Experience” 312). Curnutt remarks that romance is a persistent plot point for Fitzgerald: “Love for him is rarely a quest for companionship but, instead, a confirmation of the perfected identity” (Cambridge 59). In discussing Tender’s prose style, he writes of a “lumi­ nosity” which is never controversial when Fitzgerald describes a setting but frustrates critics when it characterizes “habits of mind” (108). He then quotes “the egos pressing up close” passage (Tender 245) to make his point. 18. Butler cites Freud in saying that “the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo; the taboo against homosexuality in effect creates the heterosexual ‘dispositions’ by which the Oedipal conflict becomes possible” (Gender Trouble 64). 19. Pearl James writes of Amory Blaine’s fascination with the body of his dead Prince­ ton friend Dick Humbird in This Side of Paradise as “part of a homophobically coded description of homoerotic desire” and that “Dick [Humbird’s] ghost is a fig­ure of reproach”

232 / Notes to Pages 77–80 (15–16). Dick Humbird’s ghost haunting Tender is Royal Dum­phry while Dick himself embodies the large outlines of Humbird as heroic wraith. 20. Eric Shouse cites Massumi that affect always precedes will and consciousness, that “the body infolds stimuli into an intensity” (Massumi 29). Kaethe G. exemplifies a case of such an intensity becoming encrypted in narrative sequence. “Kaethe had no exact intention of telling ­Nicole about the call.” “Approaching, she drew her arm gently along ­Nicole’s shoulder . . . ,” but then, predictably, “In the play they had grown hot, and ­Nicole’s reflex in drawing away from Kaethe’s arm was automatic” (Tender 249–50). Autonomic affect sets off a narrative crisis through touch. 21. Freud’s Dora dreamt that her father had died and that she must rush to a train station. She is late arriving and misses speaking to him before his death. Did Fitzgerald know of Freud’s famous case and inscribe its motion here? 22. A Diver Manuscript version of the gay male group is seen through Rosemary’s eyes at a Paris party: “the males were gathered down at the other end, amid the sheen of the mirror strips and silver, tall gangling ones and little pert ones with thin shoulders, big great broad ones with the faces of Nero and Oscar Wilde, or twisted into leers, and nervous ones who hitched and jerked opening their eyes very wide, and laughed hysterically but lightly on the upper keys, and handsome, passive dumb ones who turned their profiles this way and that, or the noble faces of senators that dissolved suddenly into girlish fatuity; pimply stodgy ones with delicate gestures; raw ones with red lips and frail curly bodies, shrill voluble ones piping above the hot volume of talk; self-­conscious ones who looked with eager politeness toward every noise; English ones with great racial self-­control, Balkan ones—a small cooing Siamese” (Third Version, Dick Diver Manuscript 248–49). 23. The extended Lausanne scene perhaps has its genesis in the 1929 Kelly version of the Tender manuscripts when ­Nicole Kelly advises her husband, film director Lew Kelly, not “to get in it” with a fellow Yalie named Curly who has drunkenly jumped overboard in the mid-­Atlantic and is then saved. Lew seriously identifies with Curly and tells her “I’ll be back in half an hour.’ ­Nicole counters, “I’ll be in bed before that” and Lew answers, “I’ll be there before you’re in bed.” (Tender Is the Night Melarky and Kelly Versions, Tender Is the Night 325). In another draft, Dick crosses over to Curly and says, “I can’t help asking if there’s something I can do for you,” which is reminiscent of Rosemary querying Campion (Tender 41) and ­Nicole similarly asking Dick (273). The encounter of Curly and Lew survived in mutated and less suggestive form for the serialized magazine version of Tender Is the Night before being cut by Fitzgerald in the published novel. 24. Dum­phry’s jouissance is “obscene” to Dick—he doesn’t want Dum­phry’s orgasm as a consequence of his own charm on any terms. He had effectively screened out F ­ rancisco’s “body” but Dum­phry returns to press up close. He imposes his “vicious” sentiment on Dick’s “whole-­souled” sentiment, not allowing him any escape, returning him safely to the symbolic, no matter how decreative and death-­haunted. 25. Wendy Steiner references Kant in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment that “any taste remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in, let alone if it makes these the standard of its approval” (Venus 69). When Dick tells Francisco he must control his sensuality, he’s controlling it, and so is Fitzgerald. Dick absorbs his charm

Notes to Pages 84–92 / 233 almost like a seminal fluid while leaving out the physical desirability of the young man. Fitzgerald converts the sexual “other” into an abstraction, a modernist aesthetic move in the guise of a sentimental one.

Chapter 4 1. Chandler quotes Shaftesbury from Characteristics of Men on what he deems his “aesthetic epistemology” in which “the mind has its own senses,” its own eye and ear: “The shapes, motions, colors, and proportions of these latter being presented to our eye, there necessarily results a beauty or deformity, according to the different measure, arrangement, and disposition of their several parts [and] according to regularity or irregularity of their subjects” (235). Such a definition uncannily matches the structure of Fitzgerald’s disquisition here on associational fragments and irregular pieces. Hinton cites Hume in the Treatise where Hume suggests the “sympathetic chord” is an acoustic mirror, a faulty or bent reflection of “passion” (Hume Treatise 576, qtd. in Hinton 166). 2. Geoffrey Galt Harpham config­ures Joseph Conrad’s literary career as “Pole, seaman, and writer,” not “as discrete stages” but “as an index to a particular obsession or imperative that structures Conrad’s work in ways he himself could not recognize.” Harpham converts Conrad’s “biographical sequence into a conceptual simultaneity. Locating not moments but strata” (One of Us x). I endorse Harpham’s comprehensive interpretation of the Conrad archive to account for my conflating Fitzgerald’s strands of the “two sisters” and the ­Zelda materials in shaping ­Nicole Warren Diver. Harpham’s use of “unconscious” for Conrad is congruent with the full range of Fitzgerald’s usage of the sentimental in Tender, which writes him as much as he criti­cally employs its tropes. ­Nicole’s rape is bleak and the Fitzgerald/Diver sisters are a perennial and uncanny “human loss.” ­Nicole, while unsentimental herself, is in the most extreme sentimental situation through the violated “affectional bond,” which generates Tender Is the Night as text. 3. Earlier Fitzgerald criticism identified extensive symbolic patterns involving Dick, ­Nicole, and World War I. See Grenberg, “Fitzgerald’s Figured Curtain” and Callahan, The Illusions of a Nation. 4. See Howard Fulweiler, Here a Captive Heart Busted: Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature. 5. Elizabeth Barnes writes, “Incest can thus be read as a metaphor for a culture obsessed with loving familiar objects.” After the Revolutionary War, “protective fathers become indistinguishable from the seductive lovers” (3). In Tender, brother-­sister sentiment is consistently overlaid by father-­daughter seduction, engineered so Dick can “save the incest victim” and keep relations “within the family.” 6. Scottie Fitzgerald recalls that one party frock ­Zelda made for her paper doll “had ruffles of real lace cut from a Belgian handkerchief ” (Cline 205). 7. Scott certainly may have appropriated Z ­ elda’s painting for ­Nicole’s decoration of the bars at the Swiss clinic in Tender. ­Zelda at Phipps “was also painting daily and while imprisoned in the Baltimore clinic, she recreated on canvas the same wild Montgomery blossoms that flourished in her novel. . . . In the paintings, geometric, angular flowers al-

234 / Notes to Pages 93–99 low the viewer to feel ­Zelda’s spikiness, while curled, layered flowers are uncontrollably sensuous” (Cline 314). In life imitating art, Cline reports Z ­ elda in 1939 received an offer from Dr. Carroll at her sanitarium in Asheville to paint floral scenes for large window screens. ­Zelda wearily declines, ironically writing Scott “that I ultimately would not subscribe to the commandeering of a professional talent. . . . My talent has cost a lot in heart-­ ache and paint-­bills; and I don’t want to compromise myself ” (374). 8. The romantic center of Tender Is the Night is the kiss between ­Nicole and Dick at Lake Geneva, the counterpart scene to Daisy and Gatsby on the Louisville street in its beauty. The scene is a narrative masterpiece of affect heightening into affection between desiring bodies: “[­Nicole’s] voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. . . . As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes” (154–55). The language of affection thus repeatedly describes intensity of affect prior to and heedless of narrative progression. When Fitzgerald has registered these intensities by ­Nicole and for the reader, he can authorize her “up in her head now, cool as cool” to “collate the sentimentalities” and sums up her affective power over Dick that truly begins here: “she had a better hold on him now” (155). Once again, sentiment relentlessly sustains affect. 9. Massumi comments on “suspension” that the “regularized, needful, useful actions of the human body hinge on its bipedal upright posture, the body’s usual way of counteracting gravity. Interrupt that and you have profoundly disconnected the human body” for the “suspended body has no logically expressible next step” (101). 10. I am indebted to Wendy Ward for linking these balance and suspension scenes in Tender (147, 155, 190). The funicular can connote two meanings: the counterbalancing railway cars and, as an adjective, a bodily structure suggesting a cord as an umbilical cord “or a bundle of nerve fibers as a spermatic cord,” such as between a mother and a child, or as Dick asks Mary North at novel’s end, “Have I been nourished?” (313). The funicular functions as a sort of literary naturalism device: if one car (or person) is rising, another must be falling. Dick’s affair with Rosemary could not stand still and had to go forward or back (85). Fitzgerald also references Rosemary’s “final severance of the umbilical cord” (40) while ­Nicole “cut the cord forever” (302) between herself and Dick. 11. To borrow from Virginia Woolf, on or about page 79, the novel is largely seen through Dick’s eyes and on or about page 267, it becomes ­Nicole’s book 12. JoAnne Dobson writes, “The principal theme of the sentimental text is the desire for bonding, and it is affiliation on the plane of emotion . . . for which sentimental writers and readers yearn. Violation, actual or threatened, of the affectional bond generates the primary tension in the sentimental text” (267). 13. The “cord” that is cut by ­Nicole is that of sentiment and Doctor Diver is now at liberty (302) from his sympathetic regime. Dick Diver has become Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, having received his thirty-million-dollar inheritance and now an invalid, “a bundled fig­ure seated in a wheelchair near the rail” of the ocean liner, “thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through” (Beautiful and

Notes to Pages 99–107 / 235 Damned 447–49), even as Dick had pointedly been in “his own story, not hers” (Tender 300) at the end of his and ­Nicole’s marriage. 14. Foucault famously has theorized sexuality as what in the twentieth century tells us our truth and is our truth. See The History of Sexuality—Volume I: An Introduction, especially Part Four, “The Deployment of Sexuality,” pp. 75–132. 15. Fitzgerald also describes Rosemary as a “young mustang” who “cross-­sectioned . . . would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell” (164–65); Dick wants to lift his children’s “beautiful heads off their necks” (311) before he leaves for America. These violent narrational surrealisms of design and physical invasion underwrite the aura of Dick’s clinical practice and the violence below the surface of his analy­sis of Warren family tragedy. 16. Fitzgerald may have intuited some of the following from Lawrence: the fact of Lawrence’s dual sexual nature, his deep interest in male love expressed between friends at the expense of women, and his reaction to their falling away. Lawrence’s sense of the physical intelligence men can absorb from each other is more radical than anything in Fitzgerald, who demonstrated a more crabbed and fearful ethos about male friendship. 17. Fitzgerald’s ultimate trajectory for ­Nicole defines what Berlant defines as “the sentimental bargain,” which “has constantly involved substituting for the representation of pain and violence representations of its sublime overcoming, which end up, of­ten perversely, producing pleasure both as a distraction from suffering and also as a fig­ure for the better life” (65–66). 18. Hemingway in his 1934 letter to Fitzgerald also reiterated that ­Zelda was “crazy” and wanted only to harm Scott’s work. For Fitzgerald to give ­Nicole to Tommy—in effect giving ­Zelda to an “Ernest” in the text—might be a final form of animus against the masculine and homosocial currents in their extended relationships. Z ­ elda and Ernest loathed and suspected each other of damaging Scott’s best selves, according to their lights. For Scott to place them “together” at Tender’s conclusion is a way for Scott to have a rather exquisite narrative power over them, full of conflicting impulses and needs. This is a subject for a longer study. 19. Curnutt writes, “because Fitzgerald’s fiction was autobiographical, he also needed constant if not melodramatic stimulation. For without that inspiration, he had nothing to write about” (Cambridge 19).

Chapter 5 1. Austro-­German Richard von Krafft-­Ebing (1840–1902) was a sensational pub­lic face of early psychiatry and what became known as “sexology” at the turn of the twentieth century. His Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) popu­larized terms such as “fetish” and “maso­ chism.” 2. According to Sandor Gilman, “the changing representations of Ophelia indicate the shifting definitions of female insanity from the erotomania of the Elizabethans and the hysteria of the nineteenth century to the unconscious incestuous conflicts of the Freudians and the schizophrenic double bind of the Laingians” (Seeing the Insane 121). 3. It is also fitting that Fitzgerald’s Eczema Woman is a painter, since there are myriad

236 / Notes to Pages 109–116 drawings and paintings of Ophelia down through the centuries, with perhaps John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia” (1852) the most famous. Millais’s work contains very detailed dabs of disparate flower petals and leaves, literally making the green and brown stream a rich broth of floral color as it bears her away. The Eczema Woman’s “tears [flow] lava-­like into her bandages”; “eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism” [get thee to a nunnery?]. 4. Showalter comments on Victorian asylums whose superintendents were Shakespeare enthusiasts and thus Ophelia herself was seen as the classic case study in mental breakdown. Women patients were of­ten looked upon as performers and “under hypnosis, were sometimes instructed to play heroines from Shakespeare. . . . [T]he Victorian madwoman looks mutely out from men’s pictures and acts a part men had staged and directed” (90). Jean Martin Charcot’s assistants in the 1870s “coached patients on the performance of their hysterical acts and surrounded them with images of female hysteria.” Gilles de la Tourette noted that hysteria could be considered a “complete art” and a “manner of theatricality” (Wechsler, “Performing Ophelia” 217). 5. Andrew Turnbull’s groundbreaking biography on Scott Fitzgerald was matched by Nancy Milford’s impassioned brief for Z ­ elda. See also Bruccoli, Scott Donaldson, and finally James Mellow on both Fitzgeralds. Linda Wagner-­Martin and Sally Cline provide the most recent authoritative accounts of Z ­ elda’s career and meanings. 6. For an always-­growing body of work on Z ­ elda Fitzgerald, see the major studies by Cline, Milford, and Wagner-­Martin as well as key articles by Simone Davis and Mary E. Wood. JoAnne Ruvoli has written to the author that Scott and Z ­ elda seem destined to be looked at as one of the legendary “art/writing couples,” yet ­Zelda accomplished less than any of the other women artists, who may include Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Joyce Johnson, Dorothy Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield. 7. Dr. Dohmler almost came to Chicago when young and imagined himself ensconced with a rich practice (Tender 127). The character of Dohmler is most likely based on Bleuler and the elder Forel. 8. Eugene Taylor believes Freud circulates a psychotherapeutic focus in Ameri­can culture, specifically in New York, Baltimore, and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., in the 1930s. It merged with an “older, intuitive psychology of character formation,” revamped into a “uniquely Ameri­can dynamic psychology of the subconscious” (Shadow Culture 218). Recall that Dick Diver wanted to be good, kind, brave, wise and “loved, too, if he could fit it in” (133). 9. Cline states that Scott was hospitalized eight times between 1933 and 1937 for alcoholism and suspected tuberculosis (319). 10. Tillman’s Helen feels that “people who suffer from eczema may have to be restrained from scratching off their perniciously itchy skin and some suffer a daily agony. It is impossible to feel another’s agony the way the sufferer feels it, and nothing makes someone feel more alone than suffering, whether it is mental or physical, pain is unbearable but borne” (113). Hardly a page goes by that Helen doesn’t relate some mental state or emotional reaction to her skin’s disorder or its sub-­epidermal eruption. 11. Scott in analyzing Z ­ elda’s eczema is always “behind” the affect, in a continual challenge to catch up in language to the eczema, as he theorizes her skin/behavior. Mas-

Notes to Pages 117–124 / 237 sumi validates: “an emotional qualification breaks narrative continuity for a moment to register a state—actually to re-­register an already felt state for the skin is faster than the word” (25). 12. Scott Fitzgerald twice phrases scenes in Tender with similar rhetoric. Dick is described early as having “the power of arousing a fascinated and uncriti­cal love” (27) while Lanier Diver “arous[es] the sympathy of his parents” during the affair of the dirty bathwater at the Minghettis (264). 13. Harold Schweizer writes in his “Introduction” to Peter Brooks’ anthology Psycho­ analy­sis and Storytelling, “If literature and psychoanaly­sis relate to each other as an inter­ play, or as a catachresis as Brooks proposes, both terms emphasize that neither fiction nor psychoanaly­sis is ground to the other, and that their positions of authority are interchangeable” (12–13). 14. Mizener guesses that the main outline for Tender was written at La Paix in 1932 (The Far Side of Paradise 344). Bruccoli states that Fitzgerald wrote in his Ledger in August 1932, “The novel now plotted + planned, never more to be permanently interrupted” (Grandeur 339). He recreates the handwritten chart with Scott’s parallels. 15. In their own ways, surrealists Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer provided emotional support for Carrington and Zurn, respectively, and primed their fantasies and sense of artistic daring by encouraging them to create in a surrealist vein (Conley 56). Zurn’s and Carrington’s texts are literally from the asylum. Jennifer Rupert points out that the male surrealists beginning in the 1920s played at hysterical subjectivity and rather than developing “somatic symptoms, they developed bodies of work” (Rupert 17). Carrington in Down Below described her life in wards and clinic, how she was repeatedly stripped, bound, and prodded (Gambrell 93) but ­Nicole does not suffer such treatment in Tender. Zurn in Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine writes the surrealist accounts of incarceration, madness, and artistic endeavor that ­Zelda never could achieve. Women writers and painters in the surrealist movement such as Carrington and Zurn fought to move past the muse-­making of their male artist-­partners. 16. Michael Nowlin concludes his excellent book with an entry from Fitzgerald’s Notebooks: Sway-­ed and driven By forces I don’t understand (high) Sway-­ed and driven Got to eat out a-­somebody’s hand Gotta eat Gotta eat out a-­somebdy’s han’ But gotta eat (155) These issues are addressed through­out Tender, in­clud­ing Dick “swayed and driven as an animal,” a Prufrock perhaps in “his fine clothes,” “as a projection of some submerged reality,” “compelled (like Rosemary taking direction?) to “walk there” or “stand here” (91). Fitzgerald’s Notebook entry here honestly admits his ambition, need for analy­sis, and ob-

238 / Notes to Pages 125–133 session. He references his own compulsive need to feel praise as an author/entertainer, a combination of the “high-­bouncing lover” of Gatsby who will do anything for romance and a determinism underwritten by the economics of his writer’s situation. 17. Sally Cline believes that ­Zelda’s dismay must be evident but admits “­Zelda’s shock and consequent emotions can only be surmised, as we have no evidence of any conversation between Scott and ­Zelda about this appropriation of the most vulnerable part of her life” (303–04).

Chapter 6 1. Steiner observes that “the avant-­grade were utterly hostile toward the ‘feminine aesthetics’ of charm, sentiment, and melodramatic excess, which they associated with female and bourgeois philistinism” (xxiv–xxv) with the result that the Modernists embraced mystification, eliminating ornament, and turning the female subject into pure form (31). 2. Sentiment is always a way of detaching fig­ure from ground, for example, a blatant tracking of a suffering victim, as in Steven Spielberg’s little girl in the bright red coat in the black-­and-­white Schindler’s List (1993), frantically traversing the bullet-­riddled street as the Nazis ruthlessly hunt and shoot down Jews. Our coerced eye follows her off the equilibrated surface chaos and into our affective hearts. 3. ­Nicole’s body becomes what Massumi might claim is “a resonating vessel for the force of information to which it is now singularly sensitized.” Fitzgerald’s conceit could be updated (uploaded) into the global net by Massumi in a statement such as, “this device encompasses a restaging of the degree-­zero of sensation, tuned to the cybernetic potential of the body. It composes a virtual center for the Internet series of events.” That “center” for ­Nicole’s “virtual” body in Fitzgerald’s text is the heart of Ameri­can production and consumption, what Massumi would call in 2002 a “networked body,” which could be “plugged into the network in such a way that its gestures would be controlled by the quantity of information traveling the wires” (124). 4. Anything “synchronized,” any meaningful coincidence of events and bodies with no overt link between them dictates that the reader must, to make an instinctive or criti­ cal judgment, force certain parts of the text into conjunction, what Jung called “synchronicity,” the “uncanny stamp.” 5. Royle cites Foster’s Compulsive Beauty that “certain surrealist practices intuit the uncanny discoveries of psychoanaly­sis, sometimes to resist them, sometimes to work through them, sometimes even to exploit them, i.e. to use the uncanniness of the returned of the repressed, the compulsion to repeat, the immanence of death for disruptive purposes—to produce out of this psychic ambivalence a provocative ambiguity in artistic practice and cultural politics alike” (Royle 97, qtd. Foster 17). 6. Fitzgerald merges the homely breakfast meal with the surreal drug of choice in the 1920s—itself a jarring surreal recombinant. Walter Benjamin was taken with the “intoxicating” hashish visions of the surrealists and later experimented with it for his own creative needs, though he ultimately disavowed it, calling it a “profane illumination.” 7. “Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram . . . frames from which the

Notes to Pages 134–135 / 239 paintings quickly slip aside and vanish . . . an entire room move(s) sideways or vertically” Breton, Nadja 112. 8. Fisher comments, the “patch” of experience, “a this with its own duration and quality”; “the sudden, the unexpected, the all-­at-­once of the visual,” an “aesthetic component [that] appears in the moment of surprise and delight and in the instantaneous visual moment within understanding. The mind says ‘Aha!’ in the aesthetic moment when the spirit says ‘Ah!’” (Rainbows 20, 26–27, 31). 9. The roles of Dick, Rosemary, and McKisco on the beach conform to the three-­ fold schemata laid out by Roland Barthes in Mythologies: Dick’s image here is the myth, ­Rosemary consumes its image, and McKisco critiques it. 10. Royle quotes David Farrell Krell who writes, “What is uncanny about Freud’s efforts is that all his sources for the uncanny are literary” (52) and Royle adds “Psy­cho­ analy­sis itself is uncanny” and “literature teaching us psychoanaly­sis, letting its uncanny truths come to light in the discussion of literary works, but also literature teaching psy­ cho­analy­sis what psychoanaly­sis is or might be.” In Tender, the person of an analyst at the center of the literary work with his patient is already uncanny, what Royle calls “the logic of haunting and ghosts” (53). 11. ­Zelda concluded Save Me the Waltz with concise criti­cal insights on cubism and surrealism through the blithe comments of Ala­bama club ladies. Their chat, miming gallery or party talk, is perhaps Z ­ elda’s bid to invent something like Scott’s Paris “cobra” women as bourgeois gossipers:



“And they said he had a platinum stomach, my dear, so that his food just dropped into a little sack when he ate. But he lived for years like that.” “That hole in the top of his head was to blow him up by, though he pretended that he got it in the war.” “So she cut her hair after first one painter then another, till finally she came to the cubists and camouflaged her scalp.” “And I told Mary she wouldn’t like the hashish, but she said that she must get something out of her hard-­earned disillusion, so there she is, in a permanent trance” (195).

This series of displacements, itself the narrative surreal, shows ­Zelda at her inclusive best about the painting milieu she had inhabited in the 1920s. The first statement depicts a clinical body that might have been a surreal grotesque and then the “platinum stomach” is bizarrely linked to a faux World War I wound, a missing top of a head, referencing the major conflict that first spurred Breton and others to depict blown body parts in juncture with machines. The third statement absurdly shifts to a woman’s hair styling that “covers” the scalp by “cubist” legerdemain through shifting perspectives. Finally, “hashish,” the signature intoxicant of the early surrealist movement, glosses all four statements, gesturing to the inspiration in which ­Zelda has written this series and punctuating what Ala­bama Beggs has learned—the disillusion of what it means for a woman to be “permanently” enthralled by art.

240 / Notes to Pages 137–140 12. JoAnne Ruvoli in an unpublished paper entitled “Infinite Promise: ­Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz,” suggests that the novel “represents an explicit anti-­sentimental­ ism” while remaining in the “sentimental discursive space” and that ­Zelda’s paper dolls inform the “tiny ­Zelda” who as Ala­bama Beggs, surrealistically voyages through her husband ­David’s ear. 13. Foster reprints facing pages from a 1929 Varietes of an elegant girl doll and a formal photograph of a woman’s face hollowed out and replaced by commodities (a house, billboard, and street scene) (141). 14. The phrase in the First Dick Diver Manuscript reads, “as a dog following a bitch” (319). 15. A Lenci doll of 1931 was “The Little Gentleman,” of baby face and size, who carried a walking stick and wore spats. 16. Geoffrey Harpham cites Jean-­Claude Milner “who described anagrams as a “return of the foreclosed, tokens of a repressed ‘real’ in language that was discernible only to the speculative inference of psychoanaly­sis” (Harpham 34). 17. Richard Godden comments, “by likening the fragments to a glazier’s off-­cuts, Fitzgerald flirts with Freudian notions of ‘distortion’ and ‘condensation’” (Fictions of Capital 106). In another vein, Toles adds that the refracting surfaces and conveyors of light and shadow (Tender 109) are what stand in the way of clear vision, something in excess of the given facts assaults the imagination (444). A sentimental gloss is always in excess. Another “uncanny” relation of Fitzgerald’s statement might be to images in Stein’s Tender Buttons. In the section “Objects,” she writes out in her distinct syntax a statement that coincides with Fitzgerald’s “refractions” in Rosemary’s room:



Any neglect of many particles to a cracking, any neglect of this makes around it what is lead in color and certainly discolor in silver. The use of this is manifold. Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary, suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed, suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle and even if it could be any black border, supposing all this altogether made a dress and suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional, if you suppose this in August and even more melodiously, if you suppose this even in the necessary incident of there certainly being no middle in summer and winter, suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement is more than of consequence, it is not final and sufficient and substituted. This which was so kindly a present was constant.

18. See my article, “‘Out Upon the Mongolian Plain’: Fitzgerald’s Racial and Ethnic Cross-­Identifying in Tender Is the Night.” Excellent contemporary accounts of the racialized formations in Fitzgerald’s imaginary are found in Felipe Smith’s “The Figure on the Bed: Difference and Ameri­can Destiny in Tender Is the Night,” Greg Forter’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychoanaly­sis, and the Fin-­de-­ Siecle Crisis in Masculinity,” and Michael Nowlin’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness. Smith first identified the bed on which Jules Peterson is found dead to be the one where Dick and Rosemary’s first sexual encounter had almost occurred (208). Forter outlines the racial implications of Fitzgerald’s ambivalence toward

Notes to Pages 140–145 / 241 his south­ern father’s manhood. Nowlin studies the racial dimensions to Fitzgerald’s conception of his own career and his internal debate about pure artistic intent set against writing for the market. 19. The ballet has contradictory references through­out Tender. Abe says after the Diver party that “sometimes [the Divers] seem just rather charming fig­ures in a ballet, and worth just the attention you give a ballet” (43). Tommy reminisces about his warrior days with “Korniloff ” and “why we never looked at anything less than a ballerina” (296)—as a trophy of war, perhaps. Scott thus both discounts ballet as an art form and calls ballerinas higher caliber lovers for mercenaries. 20. When ­Nicole berates Abe North for his morose sullenness, he exclaims, “Tired of women’s worlds.” She retorts, “Then why don’t you make a world of your own?” (81). Are these comments more pointed both racially and sexually toward Abe? In Paris when Abe “launch[es] a race riot,” Rosemary wants an answer from ­Nicole and Dick, “What did this to him? Why does he have to drink?” (99). The novel’s reading wisdom has generally concluded that Abe’s a blocked composer and his drinking stems from that. As ­Rosemary and Dick are kissing in her hotel room, the knock at the door freezes them (they believe it may be ­Nicole) and it’s Abe instead (105). Is it possible that his “scrap” with the cast of negroes is really about Abe’s sexual overtures toward them? Abe tries to say goodbye to ­Rosemary but Dick wants him out of the suite. 21. The conjunction of “Tender” in Tender Is the Night and Tender Buttons is at the very least “uncanny” and worthy of speculation. What sort of “tender” is a “tender button”? Is it an “offer,” “currency”? A “tender” in the night to ­Nicole; the “night” in Tender is a tender, a promise? Buttons tie something together, they close a gap and “bring together.” Much speculation exists as to Stein’s title as connoting “nipples” as both vehicles for erotic stimulation and maternal sustenance. See Heather Michelle Crickenberger, “Repetition: Stein’s Tender Buttons.” As Dick Diver plaintively asked of mother-­surrogate Mary North, “Have I been nourished?” (313). To curve the parallax yet further, what of Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button who reverses all human syntax and physical development in his drive toward infancy from old age to become less than a “button,” a lonely little old man/baby, finally vanishing back past the mother’s breast to the womb. He is a negated human integer, re-­writing the death drive in striking fashion, an irregular piece in an anagrammar against nature’s ordering. Such speculation may be of more interest than the story “Benjamin Button” itself (Brad Pitt notwithstanding). 22. Rappe is only barely remembered professionally as the face featured on the sheet music cover of the hit song “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and she played supporting roles in a few features in the late teens (Yallop 152). 23. Reading and writing are completely structured as uncanny acts. Horowitz quotes Freud from “The Uncanny” that “the storyteller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions” (126–27). The story itself has the same power over its created characters, as over its author, when the characters are said to go where they will, as many authors have (uncannily) recounted. 24. Unica Zurn imagines her father’s body, specifically between his legs, as a “key whose

242 / Notes to Pages 145–152 lock she herself carries in her lap” (Dark Spring 39). One might also consider Fitzgerald’s paternal relative, Francis Scott Key, for whom he was named, as a reason for him to fetishize the key as a site of both patriarchal power and anxiety. The Keys settled in Maryland around 1700 and Fitzgerald was in the sixth generation. He did write that Key’s “Star-­Spangled Banner” was “the only sign of literary activity in the family until he arrived” (Letters 484), thus linking the Key name to “name as key,” to his uncanny sentiment about the two dead sisters making him a writer. 25. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald formalizes Dick Diver’s reverie into a principle of control over all the “pieces.” Monroe Stahr says about his Hollywood empire, “When I was young I wanted to be a chief clerk—the one who knew where everything was.” Then, when he got to be “chief clerk “ (studio head), “I found out that you had to know why it was where it was, and whether it should be left there. . . . Pretty soon I had all the keys. And they wouldn’t have remembered what locks they fitted if I gave them back” (79). 26. Eby is writing about David Bourne in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. His list of Hemingway’s themes of “androgyny, narcissistic brother-­sister love, and latent homosexuality” (170) are applicable to Fitzgerald as well, although their intimate sexual scripts were very different.

Chapter 7 1. Breitweiser quotes Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to the effect that “the fantasy of a person can be incorporated as an inner person, that one can bring one’s notion of another within and experience what one supposes the inner other’s emotions to be,” and that “some people unwittingly inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestors’ lives” (251–52). 2. Douglas provided a harsh critique of nineteenth-century sentimental mothers in union with a feminizing clergy in The Feminization of Ameri­can Culture. Such a combined fig­ure is what Dick Diver becomes after all in an amalgam with his minister father, what his father had perhaps already become in courting women parishioners (Tender 203–04). 3. A Fitzgerald hero seeking the maternal breast or desiring to become it was already prominent in The Great Gatsby. For example, Gatsby kissing of Daisy on the Louisville street is the most intensely romantic image in the Fitzgerald canon, yet for Gatsby to kiss Daisy, is to “have her white face [come] up to his own,” to substitute this kiss to “wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath,” is also “suck[ing] on the pap of life, gulp[ing] down the incomparable milk of wonder” (Gatsby 112). Richard Godden in Fictions of Capital ultimately veers from casting Nick Carraway as a bourgeois apologist to writing of Gatsby seeking the maternal breast. He states, “the male lips mouth metaphors to displace the female mouth,” as “the oedipal nuzzle erases the social embrace” (98). Fitzgerald has Nick come off the rhetorical high of Gatsby’s maternal ecstasy to label it “appalling sentimentality”—the vehicle for Fitzgerald to state Nick’s embarrassment at Gatsby’s high sentiment. 4. The links between Keats’ poem and Tender Is the Night, beginning with titles, was a familiar subject for Fitzgerald critics in the formalist era. Fitzgerald wrote that “for awhile

Notes to Pages 153–163 / 243 after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling and humming” (Turnbull, Letters 88). 5. This constellation is also named the Corona Borealis or the North­ern Crown and its first mythical reference is in Ovid. One variant of the Ariadne myth has Dionysus giving her a golden crown of gems and when she died, he took her crown and threw it into the sky. As it mounted, the gems grew brighter and were turned into stars. 6. See my Sport and the Spirit of Play in Ameri­can Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner 183, 195–96. 7. I am indebted to Elsa Mitsoglou for first alerting me to the Philiomela-­Procne parallels in the Two Sisters imaginary in Tender Is the Night. John Irwin adds more mythological analogs for Tender’s imagining with a chain of informed analyses: “Given the structural connection—through implicit or explicit evocations of incest—between Ovid’s stories of Pygmalion and Galatea and of Cinyras and Myrrha on the one hand and Pausanias’s version of the Narcissus story on the other, it comes as no surprise that when Fitzgerald once again employs a more elaborated version of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth in Tender Is the Night, the myth’s incest aspect moves front and center—the violation of the sixteen-­year-­old ­Nicole Warren by her father, with the guilt he feels from the trauma becoming the cause of her mental illness” (169). 8. Poovey cites “the nurse” in Victorian popu­lar fictional plots and quotes Nightingale’s scorn for the lovelorn girl (186). For study of the nineteenth-century “Nightingale nurse” and “the new woman doctor,” and the ways in which they were both sentimentalized and sensationalized, see Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. 9. Fitzgerald writes Max Perkins about the styles of Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, and himself, in “the attempt that crops up in our fiction from time to time to recapture the exact feel of a moment in time and space, exemplified by people rather than by things— that is, an attempt at what Wordsworth was trying to do than what Keats did with such magnificent ease, an attempt at a mature memory of a deep experience” (Letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald 270). 10. Ruth Prigozy sums up Rosemary as one who because of her filmic sensibility “must see life as lights, shades, shadows” and that “she is alive only in the dark” (216). 11. The Melarky Manuscripts show Francis thinking of the Pipers snug in their home with their children (93) but there is no nightingale and no Rosemary walking the night as “nurse” to Campion and in the duel. 12. Harriet Martineau wrote of Nightingale’s passage, “we think of her dressing wounds, bringing wine & food, carrying the lamp through miles of sick soldiers in the middle of the night, noting every face & answering the appeal of every eye as she passed” (qtd. in Poovey 164–65). 13. “Stup” and “tucking” are close enough to “shtup” and “fucking” to be within range of Fitzgerald’s punning, one suspects. 14. Cuckoos lay their eggs in fairy wren nests where these eggs hatch first and the hatchling is murderous, pushing the fairy wren eggs out of the nest. Thus the cuckoos may displace any other bird and its song. Milton’s sonnet “O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray” (1645), contrasts the nightingale whose “voice portends success in love with ‘the shallow Cuccoo’ a bird which suggests cuckoldry” (McKusick 4). Milton writes of the

244 / Notes to Pages 164–165 nightingale: “Thy liquid notes that close the eye of May, / First heard before the shallow Cuckoo’s bill” (l. 5–6). 15. Another source of inspiration for the black lace bathing trunks that adorn Dick on the beach at Tender’s outset could come from a sensational anecdote that scandalized the beach community in the summer of 1926 at Juan les Pins. According to John Richardson, Maurice Sachs (1906–45) was Jean Cocteau’s “creepy, unctuous semi­narian disciple” known for taking “opium with a squadron of gay fans” at a hotel in Villefranche. He had recently caused a scandal at Juan-­les-­Pins by walking the beach hand-­in-­hand with an eighteen-­year-­old Ameri­can, Tom Pinkerton. Sachs dressed him in his priest’s soutane lined in pink crepe-­de-­chine that doubled as a beach robe; it was reported that the pink shade might actually have been flesh-­colored. Sachs’ soutane—an actual “pansy’s trick”— recalls ­Nicole’s “black lace” lined with “flesh-­colored cloth.” Pinkerton’s mother reported the matter to police as well as to ecclesiastical authorities, who might have charged Sachs with pedophilia; Cocteau worried about the scandal touching him as well. Picasso thought it all very humorous (Richardson, Picasso III 320–21). There is reason to believe that Fitzgerald would have known about the Sachs-­Pinkerton caper, for he was at Juan-­les-­ Pins in the summer of 1926. Sachs could be the model not only for the bathing drawers scene (Tender 21), but also for Francisco de Real (244–46), the “queen of Chili” at Cambridge (Sachs also attended), who is “incorrigibly corrupt,” according to his father. Sachs is nineteen at Juan-­les-­Pins while Francisco in the novel “was about 20, handsome and alert” (244). Fitzgerald can be seen to be crafting a terrific hybrid cameo on the beach with many different associations. 16. Moore writes,



Plagued by the nightingale In the new leaves, with its silence— Not its silence but its silences, He says of it: “It clothes me with a shirt of fire.” “He dares not clap his hands to make it go on lest it should fly off; if he does nothing, it will sleep; if he cries out, it will not understand.” Unnerved by the nightingale and dazzled by the apple,

. . . . 

he stumbles over marriage, (“Marriage” l. 98–114, 123) 17. In the third version of the Dick Diver Manuscript, the Rosemary-­Campion interview is in longhand, giving more evidence for newness of the material (139). Likewise, the Melarky typescript here is overwritten by Fitzgerald in longhand where Francis is transformed into Rosemary and Campion is gasping in the bushes (167). The scene in “Me-

Notes to Pages 166–174 / 245 larky” is minus Rosemary and the nightingale, which both appear handwritten (136) and are substantively the finished copy in the Diver Manuscript that will stand in the published novel. 18. Smoller suggests that McAlmon might have punned on Boyle’s title in selecting his own, for his boyfriend Glassco appeared to him as “birdlike” (193). Smoller believes that in Nightinghouls, Kay Boyle is “Dale Burke” and “Dutch Kelly” is Scott Fitzgerald in a very minor role (66). 19. Cecil Eby states that Catherine Bourne in The Garden of Eden is a split-­off feminine half of Hemingway’s ego and functions like a transvestite male (321). Rosemary func­tions as split-­off feminine half of Fitzgerald—Scott as showgirl trouper from the Triangle Club musicals at Princeton and Minnesota Christmas dances at fraternities. Dick can save ­Rosemary from lesbians; she is in (self ) love with a comely Dick (Scott) and when ­Rosemary sees who and what Campion is, she is repulsed. Dick, Rosemary, Dum­ phry, and Francisco are all Scott Fitzgeralds. Rosemary gets to giggle at Campion who is “terrible” (Tender 48), just as the lesbians are “terrible” (74), just as Fitzgerald perhaps intuits that the Hemingway who would come to write The Garden of Eden “imagines” as a lesbian. A Hemingway revisionist criti­cal industry exists about wives Mary and Pauline and haircuts and who is on top and who is “my girl.”

Chapter 8 1. Fitzgerald’s mother Mollie was something of a blank slate in his letters and journals. In This Side of Paradise, Amory’s mother Beatrice Blaine is a flamboyant eccentric rather than a drab one. In The Beautiful and Damned, Anthony Patch’s mother dies when he is five. Gatsby has no mother in the novel; Dick’s mother is dead when Tender Is the Night begins. 2. Another uncanny connection for Tender Is the Night in Martin Chuzzlewit is the character of Colonel Diver, the editor of the New York Rowdy Journal, who is a tabloid journalist with an eye for the popu­lar story who befriends young Martin off the boat in a faintly ominous way (Chapter 16). Thus the Dickens novel that yields a Sarah Gamp also yields a Diver. Furthermore, Dickens describes Diver’s editorial “ethic” in a manner suggestively similar to Fitzgerald’s concerns as an author and his courting and fear of the popu­lar taste. Colonel Diver was convinced “of the correct adaptation of his labours to the prevailing taste and of his being strictly and peculiarly a national feature of America” (290, emphasis mine). Fitzgerald, like Dickens’s Col. Diver, “knows” the Ameri­can public’s “harlot’s mind,” Albert McKisco, Daddy’s Girl, and Mrs. Burnett’s “vicious tracts.” No writer was plagued more than Dickens by unflattering criti­cal commentary on his continual sentimentalism, an estimate that clashed with his enormous and sustained popu­lar appeal for precisely the same sentiment. 3. Fisher writes, “Within stoic practice a division of the self occurs that actively pits aspects of the self against one another” (The Vehement Passions 221). Thus stoicism perhaps has a core of schizophrenic praxis that buttresses the idea that Gamp’s persona a parody of Stoicism. 4. McClintock adds that when in a “final authoritarian narrative, class and gender

246 / Notes to Pages 176–183 boundaries are withdrawn . . . the nanny haunts Freud as his abjected identification where the I=She” (91). She concludes that Freud’s Oedipal theory was “secured by a repression” and “the erasure of the female domestic worker as a primary originator of sexual and economic identity,” a fig­ure who could easily be socially empowered to gaze at naked and half-­clothed children (92–94). 5. Dick Diver is already a carnivalized and degraded name, just as the associations around Mrs. Gamp come from the same impetus in Dickens. A “Dick” is a detective or a penis; a “Diver” is a “British Loon,” another bird like the nightingale or cuckoo. The vari­ous meanings for “Dive” include to plunge into water, to go below the surface, to descend through air, and to descend rapidly in class or as sharp decline in stock (the latter two relevant to Dick’s fall). Bruccoli in Reader’s Companion credulously states, “It is impossible to determine whether Fitzgerald was aware that these words have the slang meaning of one who performs fellatio. His editors’ tolerance for the name is evidence of their innocence in this regard” (63). Could this be possible from the writer who in 1929 was calling himself the “old whore at $4000 a screw” and of an editor as acute as Perkins? 6. Mollie was the eldest daughter of Philip McQ uillan, an Irish immigrant, who after a start in Galena, Illinois, came to St. Paul and amassed a mercantile fortune of several hundred thousand dollars by the 1880s (Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise 2). Thus Fitzgerald’s obsession with Grant, Galena, and Ameri­can sec­ond chances at the end of Tender had a family semblance as well, the commercial genesis of his mother’s family money. 7. ­Nicole’s body becomes what Massumi might claim is “a resonating vessel for the orce of information to which it is now singularly sensitized.” Fitzgerald’s conceit could be updated (uploaded) into the global net by Massumi in a statement such as, “this device encompasses a restaging of the degree-­zero of sensation, tuned to the cybernetic potential of the body. It composes a virtual center for the Internet series of events.” That “center” for ­Nicole’s “virtual body in Fitzgerald’s text is the heart of Ameri­can production and consumption, what Massumi in 2002 called a “networked body” which could be plugged into the network in such a way that its gestures would be controlled by the quantity of information traveling the wires” (124). Hence’s ­Nicole’s “round belly” “traversed as continent” (Tender 55). 8. Fitzgerald appears to evidence the “hard” and “soft” properties of gold as his standard in Dick’s acting lesson to Rosemary on how to get the audience’s (reader’s) attention: “If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all out of character—you understand?” (288). Such is a textbook description of how Fitzgerald has Dick use ­Nicole’s character as example, shading her from soft to hard and back again. No wonder she stalks out in a shock of recognition! Women on stage may thus exemplify the powerful properties of gold as the “standard” in performance by manipulating “soft” and “hard.” Here is realism within romance—Fitzgerald’s most powerful “filigreed” pattern of sentiment—which he weaves through­out each novel and story. 9. Dick’s statement is maudlin and expressive of what Sedgwick calls the “regime of heterosexual male self-­pity” in which gay men, like all women, are scapegoating targets of “viciously sentimental attributions of a vitiated sentimentality” (Epistemology 145). It’s in-

Notes to Pages 184–190 / 247 teresting that Sedgwick, like Fitzgerald, ascribes “vicious” to “sentimental,” accruing multiple and refracted meanings that perhaps might include “immoral,” “reprehensible,” and “faulty.” 10. Jonas Chuzzlewit assumes he has committed parricide through­out Martin Chuzzlewit; he tries to poison his father Anthony who actually dies of a “broken heart” (they are both mean-­spirited and money mad). The fact that he was not “The Boy Who Killed His Father” is vitiated by his actual murder of Tigg Montague who is blackmailing him. Here is another uncanny skewed parallel to Tender’s Melarky version, early entitled “The Boy Who Killed His Mother.” 11. Gillian Brown regards the “desire to repudiate the mother” as coexistent with the desire to leave the “market,” into what powerful Ameri­can criti­cal fantasy calls “domestic individualism.” Just so does Dick renounce himself as the bought nurse in his gold standard speech for as Brown adds, “self-­valorization through matricide is part of what the ideology of sentimental motherhood dispenses and regulates” (168). 12. Sedgwick concludes that among the sentimental, the antisentimental, and the ressentimental, “they stand for rhetorical—that is to say, for relational—fig­ures, fig­ures of concealment, obliquity, vicariousness, and renaming” (157). This “compost” in Tender might yield a list, real and imagined, such as the following of the women in Tender Is the Night: Mollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald, the two deceased baby Fitzgerald sisters, Z ­ elda Sayre Fitzgerald, Charlotte Melarky, Wanda Breasted, ­Nicole Warren, Rosemary Hoyt, Mrs. ­Elsie Speers, Mrs. Burnett, Mrs. Gamp, Mary North, Baby Warren, Violet McKisco, Maria Wallis, Lady Caroline, the Gold Star Mothers, Kaethe Gregorovious, the Eczema Woman, the “girl” in the cemetery, the “girl” in the beer hall, the English girl in Rome, the “cobra women,” Florence Nightingale, Ophelia, Philomela, and Procne. The list is formidable in substitution and fundamental corruption of gender roles, sublimation, and s­ lippage. 13. Eby in a fine article on McTeague and Gatsby writes that because of Mac’s huge golden tooth, “the whole room took a different aspect” (135). Eby also speaks of Mac’s gold tooth and the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg as “Brobdignagian” body parts (137). Just so are Gamp and Nightingale in effect huge nurses, the most prominent and “popu­lar,” blazing their signatures.

Chapter 9 1. Faulkner is never sentimental except in derisive casting of his love-­lorn Horace Benbow: or in Light in August’s Byron Bunch (positive), Gail Hightower (futile), or Ratliff in The Hamlet in his liberal universalist moments bemoaning the human condition. 2. Fauntleroy became a best seller at a time when “there was no rigid demarcation line between adult and children’s literature” (Thwaite 95); Burnett’s novel had followed Heidi and Treasure Island (1884) and A Child’s Garden of Verses and Huckleberry Finn (1885) on the best seller charts. 3. Among Burnett titles in addition to Fauntleroy are A Lady of Q uality (1896), The Land of the Blue Flower (1904), A Little Princess (1905), The Secret Garden (1911), and The Lost Prince (1915).

248 / Notes to Pages 191–195 4. Prigozy writes of D. W. Griffith “as the creator of images that captured the imagination of a generation seeking comfort and reassurance as the nation’s growth was pushing it too quickly into an uncertain and frightening adulthood” and “his own amply chron­ icled attraction to young girls” (197–98). Could D. W. Griffith have become (D)evereux (W)arren? Prigozy also labels Griffith’s early films as “Dickensian melodramas” (197). In his short story “Magnetism” (1928), Fitzgerald remembered the old Griffith studios in Mamaroneck, New York, and “the people who had been in the early Griffith pictures . . . they had a dignity and straightforwardness about them from the fact they had worked in pictures before pictures were bathed in a golden haze of success” (Prigozy 198). “Dignity” becomes the noun bathing the Gold Star Mothers in approval (Tender 101). 5. Silas Marner as character is put in the position of Burnett’s mother “Dearest” when Lord Fauntleroy wants to take Cedric from her and raise him as his son, as Godfrey Cass in Eliot’s novel wishes to take Eppie from Silas after sixteen years. 6. Fitzgerald had acknowledged the Fauntleroy phenomenon in The Beautiful and Damned: “Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together—so of­ten had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture. . . . Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at five, the year of his mother’s death” (5). Thus did Fitzgerald ominously imagine the lonely little Anthony Patch. Elisabeth Bouzonviller cites a passage from This Side of Paradise, similarly suggestive of Fauntleroy influence, in young Amory’s relation to his mother, Beatrice: “The sight of her sitting there, slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with a sudden great pride of her . . . he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the requisite charm to please her” (This Side of Paradise 25, qtd. in Bouzonviller 93). 7. Mary North is the novel’s tenacious female survivor who continually reappears in the Divers’ lives. Fitzgerald writes, “Mary—who in the manner of an Anita Loos’ heroine had dealings only with Faits Accomplis” (286–87), gives credence to the fact that she is perhaps modeled in part on Lorelei Lee (to whom “fate was just about to start happening”) from Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a most popu­lar first novel of the prototypical innocent gold digger which definitively outsold The Great Gatsby in their year of publication (1925). Loos (1888–1981) was an extraordinarily successful Hollywood screenwriter for decades, beginning in silent films. She and Fitzgerald frequently crossed paths in both New York and Hollywood and she replaced Scott on the script of Redheaded Woman at MGM by Irving Thalberg’s order in 1932. In photographs from the 1920s, Loos was a helmet-­haired brunette with hair styled as Fitzgerald describes Mary North’s “straight dark hair” “eased with a jaunty slant over the corner of her temple, until it was almost in her eye when she tossed her head and caused it to fall sleek into place once more” (60). Loos was tiny, almost childlike, and she, like Mary Pickford, had played Cedric Errol in a version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. 8. Pickford had traded roles with the Gish sisters on stage and on film and for the most part played girl children on the cusp of adolescence (Whitfield 48, 93, 126–27). Prigozy quotes Griffith in 1921 to the effect that “the surest guide in the world to lead us

Notes to Pages 200–209 / 249 out of our daily troubles is a little star who is sweet and gentle and kind, like youth with all its yearnings and simplicity” (189). 9. Watson discusses how intimate a writer Faulkner was in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, how much he turned out his own emotional life with Estelle and their family (80–85). 10. Temple’s panting, “My father’s a judge!” must have made both Z ­ elda and Scott Fitzgerald think of Z ­ elda’s father, Judge Sayre, and of Z ­ elda’s use of Ala­bama Beggs’ father in Save Me the Waltz. A judge, a rape, and paternal power. 11. Faulkner would write a most singular compound creation of a Fauntleroy fig­ure as America’s most damaged child across the racial divide, in the fig­ure of Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon in Absalom, Absalom! He is a sad waif poked and prodded by Clytie and Judith Sutpen who have already been “seduced” by Charles Bon, their half-­brother and his dead father: “that little strange lonely boy sitting quietly on a straight hard chair in the dim and shadowy library or parlor, with his four names and his sixteenth-­part black blood and his expensive esoteric Fauntleroy clothing who regarded with an aghast fatalistic terror the grim coffee-­colored woman who would come on bare feet to the door and look in at him” (Absalom 194–95). The mute angry Charles disrupts the grotesque racialized sys­ tem that has produced him. He replaces his father (as did little Cedric) for the two Sutpen women, lying between Judith and Clytie on their tiered beds. Charles is suspended between the two not-­mothers, the two viciously proud half-­aunts who raised him. 12. Three further physical descriptions of a young boy-­man from Faulkner adumbrate those of Benjy and a transformed young Cedric. The first is of the vulnerable and romantic young Henry Sutpen in Absalom! “with eyes like ( as you might put it) pieces of coal pressed into soft dough and prim hair of that peculiar mouse-­like shade of hair on which the sun does not of­ten shine” (AA 65). Also, Tommie in Sanctuary “was stooped, in overalls” and “had a sun-­burned thatch of hair, matted and foul. He had pale furious eyes, a short soft beard like dirty gold in color” (Sanctuary 10); finally, the sad form of Ike Snopes in The Hamlet sustains and extends the description of Benjy Compson to its erotic limit: “the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair . . . bobbing steadily, drooling. . . . the eyes above the round mouth fixed and sightless. . . . The hulking shape—the backlooking face with its hanging mouth and pointed faun’s ears, the bursting overalls drawn across the incredible female thighs . . .” (The Hamlet 95). 13. What goes roaring “black and furious” out of Temple’s pale body is also renewed in Joe Christmas’s “black” blood shooting toward heaven at his castration and murder in Light in August. 14. Bleikasten, Watson, Fowler, and Forter all stress the shift in the published Sanctuary text from the origi­nal manuscript in reducing the subject of Horace’s maternal fixation in favor of the foregrounding of Temple’s abduction and rape, with the resultant diminishing of Horace to a brooding and impotent intelligence. 15. M. Thomas Inge highlights Fitzgerald’s comment on Burnett and Faulkner but concludes he was “speaking figuratively” and that the two novels “bear no resemblance in plot, structure, characterization, or style” for “like so many of Sanctuary’s first critics and

250 / Notes to Pages 212–215 readers, Fitzgerald has not seen the work clearly” (436–37). Clearly, this chapter does not agree.

Conclusion 1. ­Zelda’s girlhood friend in Montgomery, Ala­bama, was Grace Gunter, the eldest of “six beautiful Gunter girls” and daughter of Montgomery’s mayor (Cline 35). 2. The sisters Kismine and Jasmine Wash­ing­ton in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” are two of Fitzgerald’s attempts to write his sisters into his fiction by saving them. They are a pair of brittle naifs atop the Wash­ing­ton diamond mountain, ethereal and full of romantic promise. Kismine, blithe and assured, says, “Just think—I’m absolutely fresh ground. I’ve never had a boy in love with me in all my life” (92). Just as Lew Lowrie and Bess Gunther leave the decaying house to start on their life together, so do John, Jasmine, and Kismine embark into the “real” world after the imploding of the Wash­ing­ton chateau. These early and late stories work their bittersweet sentimental conclusions. 3. Lew fantasizes that the sec­ond floor of the Gunther house must overflow with “costumes and dress-­making forms, and old doll’s houses” with “many childhoods side by side drifting into every corner” (462). In 1936, Fitzgerald will find his sister Louisa’s dolls among his mother’s things as he cleans out her drawers (Turnbull 281). 4. Scott Fitzgerald was surely an avatar of the Gunther father. When he is fighting his demons in 1933, he writes in an essay on insomnia at La Paix:



So I get up and walk—I walk from my bedroom through the hall to my study, and then back again , and if it’s summer out to my back porch. . . . I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash. I need not have hurt her like that. Nor said this to him. Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable . . . what if all [after death] was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss. . . . No choice, no road, no hope—only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-­tragic . . . I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four (Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise 251).

5. The Gunther father gets off his bed and “walks the upstairs” of the house, providing an uncanny parallel in part to Devereux Warren rising from his deathbed in Lausanne. 6. Mollie McQ uillan was the only one of three sisters to marry, age 29 to Edward Fitzgerald, age 37. Of five surviving children, Mollie was the eldest; Bess Gunther is the youngest. Bess Gunther is the last daughter left and they are all certainly eccentric. Could Mollie McQ uillan be a Gunther girl as well as Gunthers be Sayre girls from Mobile? Shepherd Pratt sanitarium adjoined La Paix (Cline 351). At La Paix, Z ­ elda keeps coming and going in a ghostly way. Lew’s mobility dropping in on the Gothic scene of La Paix as house (sanitarium?) is perhaps Scott’s fantasy that he was in control of the situation and could always know where to “find” the Gunthers, whom he could summon at will imagi-

Notes to Pages 215–218 / 251 natively and/or control and save? Lew’s “rescue” of Bess also may be Scott saving ­Zelda from a “mad house,” from the La Paix, which must have been a site of incarceration for them both. 7. ­Zelda never referred directly to the effect on her of the fictionalized Warren father and daughter rape scene (Cline 339). Cline concludes that there is no such evidence on Judge Sayre’s relation to his daughters (451). 8. Reading for Emerson enables the self to project itself ad infinitum by providing an endless array of mirrors (Bercovitch 271). Fitzgerald believes in these mirrors; a broken universe is seen through broken mirrors in Tender. 9. Absorbing and then leaving out the other is parallax but it is getting something for nothing while renouncing the other, an uncomfortable and safer politics that Hemingway, for one, severely criticized. 10. At this late stage of analy­sis, we might ask if we have passed from the sentimenterotic to the sentimentaneurotic on the way to being sentimentaphobic. The rest should be silence.

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Index

Affect, 97, and affect without sentiment, 39–41; and parallax loop, 6; and Daddy’s Girl, 36; and multiple meanings in Tender, 23, 25; and Nicole’s body, 92–93; and sentimental corruption, 36; and sentiment’s failure, 41; as “thought lagging behind itself,” 145; and touch, 232n20; and Zelda’s eczema, 114–15 Agiri Fair, 49, 53, 55, 87, 92–95, 105–6, 172 Aragon, Louis, 138 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 142–44; and Dick Diver 142–44 Audiotori, Vincent, 225n24 Austen, Jane, 86 Baier, Annette, 4 Baker, Jeffrey, 153 Bakhtin, M. M., 10, 37, 224n20 Barban, Tommy, 53, 70, 87, 108, 132, 155, 177, 183, 185, 241n19; as lover of ­Nicole, 56, 99–101 Barnes, Elizabeth, 233n5 Barounis, Cynthia, 203 Barthes, Roland, 89, 220n12; Mythologies, 221n12, 239n9; The Pleasure of the Text, 89 Bate, Walter Jackson, 153

Battle of the Somme, 28 Baudelaire, Charles, 10 Baym, Nina, 23, 221n1; “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” 221n1 Beaumont Hamel, 28–29, 217 Beggs, Ala­bama (Save Me the Waltz), 41, 212–13; and crawling into David’s ear, 141, 240n12 Bellmer, Hans, 135, 237n15; and anagrams, 139; and doll photographs, 135; and transgendered fantasy, 135 Benbow, Horace (Sanctuary), 198–203, 205–9, 247n1, 249n14; and maternal yearning, 208; and narrating Temple Drake’s rape, 206–7; and Popeye, 201– 3, 205; and two sisters, 208 Benjamin, Walter: and “The Angel of History,” 37–38, 224n21, 238n6; and the flaneur, 138; and surrealists, 238n6; ­Theses on the Philosophy of History, 37 Berlant, Lauren, 140; and the sentimental bargain, 235n17 Berman, Jeffrey, 171, 225n2; The Talking Cure, 171, 225n22 Berman, Ronald, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald Murphy, and the New Arts,” 231n17

266 / Index Blaine, Amory (This Side of Paradise), 12, 31, 155, 222nn10, 222n12, 231n19, 245n1, 248n6 Bleikasten, Andre, 201, 203, 249n14 Bleuler, Eugen, 111, 236n7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10; The Rules of Art, 10; Bouzonviller, Elisabeth, 248n6 Boyle, Kay, 163, 166–67; and Robert McAlmon, 166–67, 245n18; Being Geniuses Together, 166; Plagued by the Nightingale, 166–67 Braque, Georges, 139 Breitweiser, Mitchell, 151, 242n1 Breton Andre, 128, 131, 138, 239n11; Nadja, 128, 238n7 Breuer, Joseph, 64 Broadway Melody of 1929, 50, 226n5; “The Wedding of the Painted Doll,” 50, 136 Bronte, Emily, 86 Brooke, Rupert, 28 Brooks, Peter, 89, 211, 224n22; Psychoanaly­sis and Storytelling, 5, 11, 89, 211, 224n22, 237n13; The Realist Vision, 224n22 Brown, Gillian, 247n11 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 3, 114, 165, 225n2, 227n10, 236n5; A Life in Letters, 36; The Price Was High, 8; Reader’s Companion to Tender, 246n5; Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 35, 86, 122, 237n14 Bryher, (Ellerman, Annie Winifred), 165–66 Buchanan, Daisy (The Great Gatsby), 242n3; as golden girl, 181–82 Burnett, Sara Hodgson, 16, 34, 188–97, 195, 200, 203, 221n4; and best sellers, 247n3; and career, 190–91; charm and sentiment in, 193–97; and Dickens, 192; and dolls, 190; and Fitzgerald, 187– 97; Little Lord Fauntleroy, 16, 34, 188– 97, 247n3; The Little Princess, 191, 195, 247n3; and uncanny gender slippage, 194–95; and “vicious sentimentality,” 190, 245n2 Butler, Judith, 4, 37, 46, 62, 176, 224n22, 228n2, 231n18; Bodies That Matter, 176, 228n2; and catachresis, 176; Gender Trouble, 45, 231n18; The Psychic Life of Power, 224n22

Cabell, James Branch, 190 Callaghan, Morley, 164 Callahan, John, The Illusions of a Nation, 233n3 Campion, Luis (Tender Is the Night), 64–66, 69, 73, 80, 154–55, 163, 169, 229n8; and fear of violence, 66–67; as gay male, 67; as Hemingway fig­ure for Fitzgerald, 164; and interview with Rosemary, 66– 69, 161–63; as male bird, 162; and playing a sentimental role, 66 Carraway, Nick (The Great Gatsby), 7, 242n3; and “appalling” sentimentality, 27, 242n3 Carrington, Leonora, 123, 237n15; Down Below, 237n15 Carroll, Lewis, 30, 158 Cary, Alice, 51–53, 226n8; Clovernook Sketches, 53, 226n8; and Fitzgerald’s imaginary, 51–53; and sentimental poetry, 52–53; short stories of, 53; “The Sisters,” 226n7; “Why Molly Root Gets Married,” 226n8 Cary, Phoebe, 51–53; and Fitzgerald’s imaginary; 51–53; and sentimental poetry, 52–53 Cather, Willa, My Antonia, 177 Chandler, James, 24, 84, 210, 219n4, -221n2, 230n12, 233n1; and sentiment’s early history, 230n12; and sentiment’s geometry, 10; and theatrical screening, 181; An Archaeology of Sympathy, 210, 219n4 Chaplin, Charles, 142 Charcot, Jean Martin, 236n4 Chronotope, 25 Civil War, 37, 212 Clay, Collis (Tender Is the Night), 33, 69, 161 Cline, Sally, 35, 88, 111, 113, 119, 121, 123, 125, 135, 178–79, 234n8, 236nn5–6, 236n9, 238n17, 250n7 Cocteau, Jean, 244n15 Cokal, Susann, 64 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “The Nightingale,” 162 Conley, Katharine, 237n15 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 223n2 Cowan, Lester, 8

Index / 267 Cowley, Malcolm, 219n5, 227n13; and the 1951 edition of Tender, 219n5, 227n13 Coy, Ted, 155 Crickenberger, Heather Michelle, 241n21 Cridland, Nicole, 227n11 Crimean War, 149, 158; and Florence Nightingale, 149–50 Cubism: and abstract form, 128; and anagrams, 139; and conceptual logic, 128; and cubist fiction, 84; and equilibration, 128; and modern poetry, 128; and perspective, 141 Cultural Studies, 30 Cummins, Maria, 33 Cummings, Katherine, 62, 174, 228n4 Curnutt, Kirk, 2, 221nn13–14, 231n17, 235n19; The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald , 2, 84, 127, 221n13, 231n17, 235n19; and Tender’s stature, 2; “A Unity Less Conventional But Not Less Serviceable,” 2, 221n14 Daddy Long Legs, 34, 195, 223n16 Daddy’s Girl (1918 film), 223n15; Baby Marie Osborne in, 223n15 Daddy’s Girl (Tender Is the Night), 22, 33– 36, 40, 68, 200, 221n2, 221n4, 224n18, 245n2; and “vicious” sentimentality, 35; and vicarious violation, 35–36 Davies, Marion, 160 Davis, Simone, 236n6 Defoe, Daniel, 187–88; Moll Flanders, 187–89 De la Tourette, Gilles, 236n4 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 223n18 Delmont, Maude, 143–44 De Real, Francisco (Tender Is the Night), 14, 60–61, 68, 70–76, 80, 84, 128–29, 154, 176, 186, 201, 203; and charm, 14; and Dumphry as parallax refraction, 76; and sentiment, 134; and Maurice Sachs as source, 244n15; as “Q ueen of Chili,” 154, 244n15 Dewey, John, “The Metaphysics of Experience,” 231n17 Dickens, Charles, 16, 168–70, 176, 179, 183, 192, 223n13; Bleak House, 191– 92, 223n13; and Colonel Diver, 245n2;

Martin Chuzzlewit, 16, 168–86; and sentiment, 191 Dillon, Elizabeth, 24 Diver, Dick (Tender Is the Night), 29, 65, 117, 127, 216; and absorption, 27; acting lesson, 96–97, 109; and ambition, 10; as analyst, 1; as Anthony Patch, 234–35n13; anxiety over his children, 55; as author, 5, 68, 112; and balance, 9, 71, 230n13; and battlefield tour, 28–32; and black lace drawers, 64–65; and blessing the beach, 186; as “brave and kind,” 56; and “carrying the egos,” 63, 70–76, 79, 83; as case study, 42; as Cedric Errol, 194–97; and charm, 15, 32, 60–64, 68, 70–76; and children, 137, 235n15; and “choosing” Ophelia, 109; as colonial body, 86; as currency, 182–83; as dandy, 10; and decline in Rome, 119; as ­Devereux Warren, 59, 75–76, 100; and dialogue with Elsie Speers, 57; and dialogue with the Eczema Woman, 91–92, 184; and “Dicole,” 24, 118, 136; and disgust, 7; as Diver mother, 47; as Diver sister, 47; as doctor, 3; dramatic kiss with Nicole at Lake Geneva, 152; and Dumphry, 70–77; and ego structure, 61; and empathy, 176; and “esoteric burlesque,” 63; and failure to protect Nicole, 39– 41; and Fatty Arbuckle, 142–44; flirting with Mary North, 58; as Florence Nightingale, 157–60; and Francisco de Real, 61, 70–76, 208; and Francis Scott Key, 242n24; and gays, 60–63; as general, 159, 170; and “the girl,” 109, 136; and gold star mothers, 21, 36–37; and “heart going out,” 8, 42, 83; as hireling, 3; and homosocial bond, 61; and “how many women is power,” 168–74, 180– 85; as husband, 3; insulting the Minghetti sisters, 55; and keepsakes, 70; and key to silver closet, 142–46; and law of the father, 62; and love of Rosemary, 57; and “low painful fire of intelligence,” 13; and male absorption, 15; as male nightingale, 165; as mannequin, 138–39; and Mary North as “mother,” 57; and maternal role, 22, 46; and melodrama, 7,

268 / Index 44; and merging with Nicole, 53; and modern choice, 36–37; and Monroe Stahr, 242n24; and mourning, 38, 45, 72; and multiple roles, 22; as naïve and sentimental collage, 4; name as sexual pun, 150, 176, 246n5; as nurse, 157– 60, 180; and nurses, 168–78; as one and equal with Nicole, 6; and pedophilia, 44; and performance, 97, 122; Psychiatry for Psychiatrists, 158; as Q ueen Moon, 154–55; as quick study, 112; and “rare” sentiment, 8; and refracted sensibility, 6, 83; and romance, 32; as romantic hero, 3; and romantics, 12; and rosary beads, 145–46; Rosemary as feminine avatar, 69; and Sarah Gamp, 168–86; as Sarah Gamp, 174–77; and saving himself, 125; and saving Nicole, 200; and sentimental analyses of sentiment, 29; and sentimental boundaries, 122; and sentimental conundrum, 41; as sentimental failure, 141; and sentimental logic, 128; as sentimental man in crisis, 10; and sentimental performance, 32; and sentimental regimen, 59, 156; and sentimental reverie, 22; as sentimental “site,” 1–4; and sentimental stories to self, 185–86; and sentiment re-­sentimentalized, 73; and sibling incest, 50; and sisters, 59; as “spoiled priest, 64; and sympathetic nature, 15; and south­ern Ameri­can roots, 22; as surrealist automaton, 138; and surreal moments, 129–30; and taste, 7–8; and teenage Nicole, 49; as “tender,” 3; as toymaker, 136; and “trick of the heart,” 8, 27, 42, 50; as “tucked,” 65; and uncanny moments, 129–31; and use value, 182– 83; vamping Mary North, 195; and view from the closet, 73; and “wanting to be loved,” 1, 56, 193; and “whole new world,” 36; and “whole-­souled” sentiment, 31, 44; and World War I, 29–31, 190; and view of Daddy’s Girl,” 35 Diver, Lanier (Tender Is the Night), 94, 97, 155, 237n12 Diver, Nicole Warren (Tender Is the Night), 3, 10, 13, 37, 41, 58–59, 63, 65, 70, 79–

80, 134, 139, 151–52, 174, 194, 199, 210–11, 216, 227n9; and abuse narrative, 85, 144; and affect without sentiment, 39–41; at the Agiri Fair, 92– 95; and All Fool’s Day, 107; as avatar of “Daddy’s Girl,” 35, 39, 65; and baby talk, 137; and black lace bathing drawers, 64– 66, 88–89; and bloody coverlet, 88; and blush, 93; as body of Ameri­can continent, 14, 129, 177, 181–82, 184, 246n7; and buying spree, 135; as case study, 119; and “collating the sentimentalities,” 120, 125; as “complete” without Dick, 56, 102; and damaged private space, 40; and the death drive, 145; and decorating the phallus, 65; and denial of her artistic consciousness, 87–90; and detachment, 132; and Dick Diver’s “key,” 144– 45; and Dick’s acting lesson, 96–99; and “Dicole,” 24; as domestic heroine, 87– 90; and dying father, 78; in early drafts of Tender, 111; and eczema, 116; as the Eczema Woman, 156; as enervated wife, 78; and epistolary heroines, 86–87; equilibration in madness, 93; and fictional parallels with Zelda’s case, 120– 22; and filigreed sanitarium bars, 88–90; and fractured syntax, 134; as golden girl, 181–82; and the gold star mothers, 37– 38, 45; as inscrutable center of Tender, 84; and Kaethe Gregorovious, 76–78; and keepsakes, 27; and letters to Dick, 34; and life at the clinic, 88–90; and lovebirds, 167; and mad episode (Book One), 27; as matricide, 152; and moonlight, 155; and “new lining,” 231n15; and nursing, 77, 168–86; as Ophelia, 56, 105–9, 121; and parallax, 88; and Paris breakdown, 39–41; as paternal incest survivor, 22, 42–44, 59, 90; as Penelope, 88; and “perverse gaze of sympathy, 88; as Philomela, 156; and popu­lar music, 107; as “precipitate” of Zelda, 11, 15, 102; and recovery, 102; and refraction, 84–87; and regenerating Tender, 11; and “rotting,” 55; as “saved” sister, 99–100; as sentimental spectator, 95; and sexual

Index / 269 awakening, 99–101; and sexual madness, 108; and stream of consciousness, 57; and suckling at Dick’s chest, 152; and suffering, 108, 144; in surreal collage, 100, 129, 181–82; and Tender’s General Plan, 120–22; and Tommy Barban, 56, 96, 99–101; and violation, 194, 206; as virtual body, 246n7; and Zelda Fitzgerald, 86, 217 Diver, Topsy (Tender Is the Night), 94, 155, 173 Dobson, JoAnne, 53, 234n12 Donaldson, Scott, 164–65, 225n2, 236n5; Fool for Love, 226n6 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 163; and Marianne Moore, 165–66 Douglas, Ann, 38, 62, 151–52, 242n2; The Feminization of Ameri­can Culture, 242n2 Drake, Temple (Sanctuary), 104, 189, 192, 199–201, 203, 205–9, 249n10, 249n13, 249n14 Du Maurier, George, 93; Trilby, 93 Dumphry, Royal (Tender Is the Night), 61, 64–66, 73–76, 84, 129, 132, 154, 176, 186, 201, 203; as denying same-­sexed grace, 75; and detachment, 132; and the Diver dinner party, 73–76; and doubling Dick Diver, 73–76, 231n16; and doubling Francisco, 73–76; and the dying father, 75–76; and hustling Dick Diver, 231n16; and manuscript “encounter” with Abe North, 229n8; and “pressing up close,” 232n24; and queer textuality, 73–76; and the sentimental 7, 134 Eby, Cecil, 145, 242n26, 245n19 Eby, Claire, 185, 247n13 Eczema Woman (Tender Is the Night), 14– 15, 44, 70, 84, 153, 158, 167, 172, 176, 227n9, 235n3; and dialogue with Dick Diver, 90–91; and doubling Devereux Warren, 77–78; and Esther Summerson (Bleak House), 191–92; and Nicole as “sister,” 156–57; and Ophelia, 236n4; and painted body, 92; and painting, 92, 235n3; and Sarah Gamp, 175, 184; and

Zelda Fitzgerald, 87, 90–95, and Z ­ elda’s self-­knowledge, 115–16; as Procne, 156–57; as sentimental symbol, 116; as surreal object, 128; as “war victim,” 115 Edelman, Lee, 192, 202–3; No Future, 202–3 Einstein, Albert, 5 Eliot, George, 86–87, 191; Silas Marner, 191, 248n5 Ellis, Havelock, 199 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 216, 251n8 Ernst, Max, 237n15 Errol, Cedric (Little Lord Fauntleroy), 189–96, 201, 203, 209, 248n5, 249n12; and Benjy Compson, 204; and Dick Diver, 193; played by Mary Pickford, 248n7; and Popeye (Sanctuary), 202; and ­Rosemary Hoyt, 195–96; and sentimental charm, 193–95; and Shirley Temple, 191 Faulkner William, 9, 16, 104, 188–92, 197–209; Absalom, Absalom!, 249n11, 249n12; and the Compsons (The Sound and the Fury), 199, 204–5; Go Down, Moses, 207; and The Great Gatsby, 197; The Hamlet, 200, 247n1, 249n12; and Keats, 207; Light in August, 207, 247n1, 249n13; and Moll Flanders, 189; and Mrs. Harris, 187–88; and narrating Temple Drake’s rape, 199, 206–7; and Ophelia, 187–88; Sanctuary, 16, 104, 109, 188–92, 197–209, 249n9, 249nn14–15; and Sarah Gamp, 187–88; Sartoris, 160; and sentiment, 208; The Sound and the Fury, 197, 199, 204–5, 249n9; and tragic-­comedy, 199 Ferenczi, Sandor, 225n3 Fetterley, Judith, 52, 226n8; “Who Killed Dick Diver,” 150–51 Fisher, Philip, 98; and “wonder,” 27, 222n6; Hard Facts, 97; The Vehement Passions, 219n3, 221n3, 245n3; Wonder, 222n6, 239n8 Fitzgerald, Annabel, 48, 51–53 Fitzgerald, Edward, 215, 227n10, 250n6 Fitzgerald, Frances Scott (Scottie), 233n6

270 / Index Fitzgerald, F. Scott: and absorption, 62– 63, 76, 80, 110, 116, 153, 155, 162, 167, 176, 188, 193, 207–8; and affect without sentiment, 39–41; “Afternoon of an Author,” 2, 50; “An Alcoholic Case,” 157; Ameri­can exceptionalism, 188; and Ameri­can romance paradigm, 71; as androgynous, 125; and anagrams, 139–42, 150; and androgynous imagination, 197; and anxious moral sentiment, 43; and ars decoratif, 129, 133; and “Author’s House,” 42, 51–53, 226n8; “An Author’s Mother,” 51–53, 226n6; “Baby­ lon Revisited,” 8, 35, 124, 196, 217; and bad sentiment, 36; and balance, 9, 94; battles with Zelda over fictional material, 15, 116–19, 150, 211, 216; The Beautiful and Damned, 12–15, 221n13, 245n8, 248n6; and Benjamin Button, 241n21; “Benjamin Button,” 225n3, 241n21; and bodily integrity, 94; and “The Boy Who Killed His Mother,” 247n10; and breakdown, 119–120; and the Cary sisters, 51–53; and castration, 92; and charm, 79–80, 126, 208; and childhood, 46; and chronotope, 10; and the Civil War, 37; and co-­doctoring on Zelda’s case, 91, 111; and “collating the sentimentalities, 117–25; conflation of incest and homosexuality, 64; and the consumer marketplace, 36; The Crack­Up, 2, 71, 210; and the creative process, 60; and criti­cal estimates, 2; and cubism, 127–29, 132–33; and cubist planes, 129; and cultural criticism, 1–12; description of gay males, 232n22; and the desiring imagination, 48; desperate to complete Tender, 117; and detachment, 132, 144–45; as Devereux Warren, 54, 145; and D. H. Lawrence, 101, 235n16; “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” 250n2; and Dickens, 191–93; and displacing the mother, 45, 80, 152; and the Diver dinner party, 25–27, 155; Diver Manuscript (First Version), 101, 161, 173, 229n8, 240n14; Diver Manuscript (Second Version), 229n8, 229n9; Diver Manuscript (Third Version), 74, 78, 134, 168, 172,

186, 191, 231n15, 232n22, 244n17; ­doing sentiment in different voices, 27; and the “dying fall,” 27, 32, 152; as entertainer, 237n16; and erotics of materialism, 182; and estimates of his own writing, 122–25; and “fairies,” 61; familiarity with psychoanaly­sis, 111; and family romance, 59; and father as minister, 54; and Fatty Arbuckle, 143–44; and Faulkner, 104, 109, 187–90, 197– 209; as female Scott Fitzgerald, 80, 100; and feminine receptivity, 36, 45–46, 100, 150; and fiction as “trick,” 50; and Florence Nightingale, 150, 157–60; and Frances Hodgson Burnett, 187–97; and Francis Scott Key, 192; and free indirect discourse, 34; and future shock, 132; and Gertrude Stein, 142, 240n17; and “the girl,” 109–10, 120, 124, 128, 139, 211; and gold imagery, 180–85, 246n8; and good sentiment, 1–17; and grief and mourning, 16, 44, 151, 210–11; as “half-­ feminine,” 109, 179; as Hamlet, 106; “hard” and “soft” performance, 246n8; and the “harlot’s mind,” 192; and “heart going out,” 8, 91, 210; and Hemingway as model for Tommy Barban, 235n18; and Hemingway’s sexual script, 242n26, 245n19; “Her Last Case,” 157, 160; and heterosexual male animus, 62; holding two opposing ideas, 98, 167; homosexual accusations against, 164; homosexuality and rape, 121; and homosocial imaginary, 78, 80, 154–56; and hospitalization, 236n9; and identities, 14; and incest plot, 50, 58, 94, 183, 189, 214, 218; and influences, 14; and Kant, 1; and Kay Boyle, 166–67; and Keats, 2, 148–49, 152–57, 160–61, 167, 242n4, 243n9; Kelly Manuscript, 232n23; and Krafft-­Ebing, 104; as Laertes, 106; at La Paix, 212, 214, 250n4, 250n6; and La Paix dialogue with Zelda, 121–22; letters to Zelda’s doctors, 113–119; A Life in Letters, 114, 165, 171, 178, 242n24; and literary heroes, 9; and literary modernism, 3, 127; Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sanctuary conflated, 202–3; and

Index / 271 Lois Moran, 34; The Love of the Last Tycoon, 60, 242n25; and male absorption, 15; and the male feminine, 62; and male sentiment, 6, 10; managing Zelda’s illness in fiction, 110–26; and maternal appropriation, 179, 208–9; and maternal breast in Gatsby, 242n3; and matricide, 193; Melarky Manuscript, 11, 69, 165, 184, 191–93, 232n23, 243n11; and mise en abyme, 39, 182; as modernist, 3, 7; “More Than Just a House,” 211–16; and mother’s last days, 51–53; and mother’s womb, 145; and “moving” sentiment, 221n2; and multiple meanings of affect, 23; multiple role identifications, 16; and the M ­ urphys, 102; and nineteenth century popu­lar culture, 30– 32; Notebooks, 46, 62, 180; and novel­ istic capital, 75; and the nursery, 48; and “Ode to a Nightingale,” 149–57; and Ophelia, 104–10; and outing sentiment, 15, 65; and “a pansy’s trick,” 60; and paper dolls, 135–38; and parallax, 209, 211, 216; and particle and wave, 84; as professional writer, 125; and performance, 54, 171; and “plagued by the nightingale,” 150, 158; and primal scene imaginary, 54; and psychiatrist hero, 4; psychoanaly­sis and literature, 113–19; and punning on authorship, 56; and the Q ueen Moon, 149–52, 155, 167, 207; and queering the text, 15; and “rare” sentiment, 8–9; and references to gay males, 78; and refractions 6, 14, 140– 42; and regulating Nicole’s art, 87–90; as replacement child, 43; and Robert McAlmon, 163–65; romance and realism in, 129, 131, 200, 246n8; as romantic, 3; and Sanctuary, 189, 197–209; and Sanctuary’s opening scene, 201–5; and Save Me the Waltz, 117–19, 123– 24; and The Sound and the Fury, 204– 5; and sensation, 197; and sentiment, 2, 5, 10, 59, 61, 138; and sentiment abandoned, 40; as sentimentalist, 3, 127; as sentimental romancer, 13; sentiment and sentimentality, 7–10; and sentiment as charm, 7; and sentiment as signature, 43,

214; and sentiment’s strengths, 3; and suffering, 37; and sentimental completion of Tender, 209; and sentimental ambivalence, 17; and sentimental conclusions, 211; and sentimental identities, 10, 14, 69–76; and sentimental imaginary, 41; and sentimental paradoxes, 218; and sentimental prologues to Tender, 12; and sentimental range, 24; and sentimental unconscious, 216; and sentimentality, 32; and Shirley Temple’s sentimentality, 196; as showgirl at Princeton, 65, 228n3, 245n19; and sibling incest fantasy, 48; and St. Francis, 138; and superego policing sentiment, 80; and surrealism, 127–33; Taps at Reveille, 160; and “tendering,” 217; and Tender’s epi­ graph, 149–50; and Tender’s form, 3; and Tender’s “General Plan,” 114, 120– 22, 187, 198; and Tender’s identities, 14; and Tender’s influences, 15–16; and Tender’s meaning, 3; and Tender’s refractions, 14, 84–85; theories on Z ­ elda’s ­eczema, 114–17; This Side of Paradise, 3, 12, 31, 155, 222n10, 231n19, 248n6; and transference, 65; and “tricks of the heart,” 68; and “true” sentiment, 8; and “two faces of the same world spirit, 187– 89, 193; and two Fitzgerald sisters, 6, 15, 42–59, 102–3, 149–51, 175, 177, 179, 209, 213–17, 225nn1–2, 250n3; and two opposed ideas, 167; and “vicious” as “vicarious,” 36; and “vicious” sentimentality, 9, 35, 61, 67; and what made him a writer, 172, 204; and “whole–souled” sentiment, 61; and writing as a sentimental act, 51, 138; and the uncanny, 52, 127–46, 213; and Victorian drag, 151; vulgar and beautiful conflated, 69; “Wanda Breasted,” 165, 229–30n10; as wise baby, 48; and women as power, 180–85, 200; writing Dick Diver, 165; and writing female victims, 44; Zelda and nursing, 171–72; and Zelda’s illness 113, 211, 216; and Zelda’s sexuality; 115–17 Fitzgerald, Louise Scott, 48, 51, 53, 225n2, 226n6 Fitzgerald, Mary Ashton, 48, 224n2, 226n6

272 / Index Fitzgerald, Mollie McQ uillan, 51, 53, 56, 168–69, 197, 212, 214, 226nn6–8, 227n10, 245n8, 246n6, 250n6; and incest, 189; physical appearance of, 178– 79; and the poems of Alice Cary, 51–53, 178; and Sarah Gamp, 178–80; Scott Fitzgerald’s view of, 178–79 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 2, 61, 85, 88, 99, 110–26, 196, 210, 218, 226n4; and artistic disciplines, 90; and ballet, 141; Caesar’s Things, 121–22; and “collating the sentimentalities,” 118–25; Collected Writings, 124–25; criti­cal work on, 236nn5–6; and cubism, 128, 239n11; eczema and shame, 115; and eczema diagnosis, 113–19, 236n11; as the Eczema woman, 87, 90–95; and Ernest Hemingway, 235n18; and the Gunter girls, 250n1; and Gunther sisters, 213; and illness, 11; and incest material in Tender, 124–25, 251n7; institutionalization of, 6; and invasive treatment, 123; at La Paix, 212, 214, 250n6; and La Paix dialogue with Scott, 121–22; and lesbianism diagnosed, 90; and letters to Scott, 118–124; as “living Fitzgerald sister,” 125; and “More Than Just a House,” 213–15; and multiple roles, 110; and narrative intent, 43; and Nicole Diver, 102–3; painting at Phipps, 233n7; and paintings of ballet dancers, 122–23; and paper dolls, 135–38, 233n7; and paternal abuse, 125; as patient at Phipps, 212; as patient at Prangin’s, 90–91; reading Sanctuary, 198; rebuttals to Scott, 124–25; and religious fervor, 124; and sanitarium treatments, 143; and Sarah Gamp, 184; Save Me the Waltz, 110, 112–13, 117–19, 127, 138, 141, 239nn11–12, 249n10; and “saving” her in Tender, 131; and Sayre family, 213, 215; and Scott’s reaction to illness, 15; as schizophrenic, 44, 110; and Scott’s writing, 122–24; and sentimental relations, 124–25; sex and sentiment, 124–25; speed of her writing, 112–13; and suffering, 123–26; and surrealism, 128; and

suspicion of Lois Moran, 35;and two sisters trauma, 43, 48; and views of sentiment, 35; and writing, 6, 11, 130 Fitzgerald sisters: 15, 79, 84, 128, 169, 184, 203, 211, 218, 227n9, 227n12, 228n16; as anagrams, 139; and Arbuckle case parallels, 144; death of, 11; and the death drive, 55; displaced in anagrams, 139; as fragmented portrayals, 55–56; and incest plot, 50, 134; and Fitzgerald’s subconscious, 59, 179; and grief, 43; making Scott a writer, 121; Monte Carlo girls as avatars, 100; and “More Than Just a House,” 211–16; and mourning, 43; ­Nicole and the Eczema Woman as, 157; Nicole and Rosemary as, 203; in the parallax gap of sentiment, 59, 117; refracted in the gap, 117; and saving Zelda and Nicole, 85, 102–3; and sentiment, 130; and sentimental saving, 213–16; and Tender’s plot, 56, 59; Flaubert, Gustave, 128; Sentimental Education, 10 Forel, Auguste, 111, 236n7 Forel, Oscar, 111, 114–15 Forter, Greg, 36, 72, 180, 201, 208, 249n14; “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychoanaly­sis, and the Fin-­de-­Siecle Crisis in Masculinity,” 240n18 Foster, Hal, 128–31, 138–39, 145, 240n13; Compulsive Beauty, 238n5; and the “mechanical commodified,” 133; and the “recovered outmoded,” 133; and the “veiled erotic,” 134; Foucault, Michel, 134, 171, 235n14; The History of Sexuality, 62, 235n14; and sexuality’s truth, 22; “What is Enlightenment?” 10 Fowler, Doreen, 200, 209, 249n14 Freud, Sigmund, 4–5, 21, 34, 130, 174, 225n3, 230–31n14, 231n18, 232n21, 239n10, 241n23; and Ameri­can culture, 236n8; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 128; Civilization and its Discontents, 145; and the defiled nursery, 35; The Ego and the Id, 45; Eros and Thanatos, 145; Freudian terminology in America, 198–

Index / 273 99; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 24, 62; and incest as universal fantasy, 64; “Letter to an Ameri­can mother,” 230–31n14; manifest and latent content in, 131; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 45; and “the nanny,” 246n3; and nurse’s agency, 173–74; and predation in the bourgeois family, 35; and ­primal scene imaginary, 44; and the seduction theory, 43; and skepticism about treatment of homosexuality, 72; Studies on Hysteria, 65; “The Uncanny,” 7, 130, 144, 241n23 Frontier Mothers, and “no wolves at the door,” 151 Fulweiler, Howard, Here a Captive Heart Busted, 233n4 Fuss, Diana, 24, 62 Fussell, Paul, 28–29 Gamp, Sarah (Martin Chuzzlewit), 16, 151, 157, 167–86, 209, 247n13; as classic fool, 185; as drunken nurse, 170, 173; and the gold standard, 180–85; and male sentimental ego, 177; and M ­ ollie McQ uillan Fitzgerald, 178–80; and Mrs. Harris, 170–71, 175; as schizophrenic, 170–71; and two sisters imaginary, 177, 179 Gardner, John, The Art of Fiction, 222n12 Gatsby, Jay (The Great Gatsby), 1, 7, 25, 27, 39, 75, 77, 182, 193, 242n3, 245n8 Gibbs, George, 225n24 Gilbert, Gloria (The Beautiful and Damned), as romantic touchstone, 14; and sentimental education, 13, 220–21n12; as spokesperson for Fitzgerald, 13–15 Gilman, Sandor, Seeing the Insane, 235n2 Gish, Lillian, 49 Gold standard, 180–85; and gold’s properties, 180–82; and “gold star m ­ uzzers,” 184; and Silas Marner, 192; United States history of, 180–81 Gold Star Mothers, 128, 132, 151–52, 188; and Nicole, 45–46; and nineteenth century sentiment, 22; and sentimental parallax, 38

Godden, Richard, Fictions of Capital, 240n17, 242n3 Gone With the Wind, 157 Grant, Ulysses S., 30, 159, 246n6; and Galena “exile,” 159, 246n6 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 23, 25, 27, 38, 154–55, 171, 179, 189, 197, 238n16, 247n13; and gold symbol patterns, 182; and kiss on the Louisville street, 234n8, 242n3; and Nick’s “crush on Gatsby,” 228n6; and “rare” sentiment, 27; and Tender Is the Night, 1–3 Gregorovious, Franz (Tender Is the Night), 76, 92, 111–12, 144–45, 183; modeled on Oscar Forel, 112 Gregorovious, Kaethe (Tender Is the Night), 79–80, 112, 173, 201, 232n20; and ­Nicole, 76–78, and class, 77; and race, 77; and senses, 77; and touch, 232n20 Grenberg, Bruce, “Fitzgerald’s Figured Curtain,” 233n3 Griffith, D.W., 195, 248n4, 248–49n8; and Devereux Warren, 248n4 Griswold, Rufus, 52; The Female Poets of North America, 52–53 Gunther Sisters (“More Than Just a House”), 212–215 Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows, 116 Hamlet (William Shakespeare), 104–10 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 240n16; One of Us, 233n2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9 Heidegger, Martin, 5 Hemingway, Ernest, 3, 9, 36, 102, 163– 65, 197, 243n9, 251n9; and the “dying fall,” 164; The Garden of Eden, 242n26, 245n19; and letter to Fitzgerald on Tender, 102; and Robert McAlmon, 164– 66; Selected Letters, 102; and sexual script, 242n26; and transgendered imagery, 245n19; and Zelda Fitzgerald, 235n18 Hemingway, Mary, 245n19 Hemingway, Pauline Pfieffer, 164, 245n19 Hendler, Glenn, 9–10, 24, 62 Herget, Winifried, 86

274 / Index Higgins, Brian, “Sober Second Thoughts,” 220n5 Hinton, Laura, 4, 72, 87, 233n1; and binocular parallax, 6 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 199 Horowitz, Gregg, 46, 72, 177, 241n23 Howells, William Dean, 190 Hoyt, Rosemary, 10, 13, 15, 18–19, 23– 24, 27, 29, 37, 41, 46, 59, 70, 79, 84, 88, 138, 155, 182, 184, 190, 194, 196, 221n5, 229n8; as Ameri­can audience, 67; and America’s “harlot’s mind,” 136; and anagrams, 140–42; as author-­ manque, 56; and cubism, 134; and ­Daddy’s Girl, 33–36, 42; as Daddy’s Girl, 22; and delight in Hollywood, 65; as “dewy with sentiment,” 191; and Dick as fetish, 68; as Dick Diver’s child, 47, 152; and Dick’s acting lesson, 96–99; and Dick’s seduction, 206; as feminine half of Fitzgerald, 245n19; as Florence Nightingale surrogate, 158, 161–63; and gaze, 201; and the Gold Star Mothers, 36–38; at the golf course duel, 163; and Hollywood’s camera eye, 27; as Hollywood signifier, 69; and Hollywood training, 68–70; and the horse chestnut tree, 131–32; and Hoytie Wiborg, 226n4; and infantile desire, 47–48; and interview with Campion, 66–69, 161– 63, 244n17; as Little Lord Fauntleroy, 195–96; and loving the Divers, 47; and Moll Flanders, 188; as movie starlet, 122; as narrative consciousness, 24, 27; and ­Nicole, 130; and Nicole in the bathroom, 39–41; as nightingale, 161–63; and the nursery, 48; and nursing, 173; as Ophelia, 104–5, 109; and “a p­ ansy’s trick,” 68; as paper doll, 136; as Peterson’s obverse double, 140; as phallic object, 69; and the phallus, 109; and reading Campion, 68–70, 161–63; and refraction, 83; and romance, 31; and ­rosary beads, 146; and rosemary as “remembrance,” 146; and scenes of queering, 67–69; as sentimental subject, 33; as silent film star, 157; and taking direc-

tion, 63; and Temple Drake, 205–7; and the uncanny, 134; and uncanny turning, 140–42 Hume, David, 9, 21, 36, 128, 210, 230n12; “Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” 14; and in­di­vidual sensations, 4; and sentiment’s significance, 4; and sympathy as moral sentiment, 4; A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, 4, 224n18; A Treatise of Human Nature, 4, 36, 233n1 Inge, M. Thomas, 249–50n15 Irwin, John, 243n7; and incest in Tender, 243n7; Pygmalion and Galatea in Tender, 243n7 James, Henry, 75, 87, 190 James, Pearl, 231n19 James, William, 37 Jameson, Fredric: “The Ideology of the Text,” 222n9; Marxism and Form, 125, 220n11; The Prison House of Language, 72, 225n25 Joyce, James, 3, 164 Jung, Carl, 111, 220n9; and synchron­icity, 238n4 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 5; Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, 1, 232n25; and sentimentality, 1 Keaton, Buster, 143 Keats, John, 2–3, 26, 150, 157, 160–61, 176, 186, 242n4, 243n9; “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” 221n13; and negative capability, 2, 219n1; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 2, 16, 149–57, 161–63, 169; and Tender’s epigraph, 149–57 Kerr, Frances, 179 Key, Francis Scott, 242n24 King, Stephen, The Shining, 227n11 Klee, Paul, 37; “The Angel of History” 37–38 Knight, David (Save Me the Waltz), 138, 141 Krapaelin, Emil, 111–12 Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von, 104, 109, 187, 198, 235n1; Psychopathia Sexualis, 235n1

Index / 275 Krauss, Rosalind, 136; The Optical Unconscious, 136 Krell, David Farrell, 239n10 Lacan, Jacques, 4–5, 42, 59, 231n16; and object cause of desire, 5; and le sinthome, 80 Lanahan, Eleanor, 137 Lawrence, D. H., 101, 200, 230n11, 235n16; Fantasia of the Unconscious, 200, 230n11; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 101 Lehan, Richard, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction, 228n1 Lenci dolls, 240n15 LeVot, Andres, 178, 222n8 Lichtenstein, Therese, 139 Lincoln, Abraham, 141 Lindbergh, Charles, 221n5 Little Lord Fauntleroy. See Errol, Cedric Little Lord Fauntleroy (Burnett), 188–97, 201, 209, 247n2; and incest fantasies, 194, 196; and sentimental boys, 190–97; vamping the mother, 194–97; “vicious” sentimentality in, 194–97 Lloyd, Harold, 142 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 52 Loos, Anita, 58, 248n7; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 248n7; as source for Mary North, 248n7 Love, Heather, Feeling Backward, 37 Lowrie, Lew (“More Than Just a House”), 212–16; and parallels with Dick Diver, 214–15 Loy, Mina, 163 Lukacher, Ned, 44, 175, 228n16; Primal Scenes, 175 Lyotard, Jean-­Francois, 140 MacLeish, Archibald, 164 Magritte, Rene, 134 Mandeville, Bernard, Fable of the Bees, 97 Marcus, Steven, 170 Martin Chuzzlewit (Charles Dickens), 16, 168–86, 247n10 Martineau, Harriet, 243n12 Masson, Jeffrey, 225n3 Massumi, Brian, 6, 35, 219n2, 232n20,

234n9, 236n11, 238n3, 246n7; and affection doubled, 35; and feedback loop, 220n6, 225n24; Parables of the Virtual, 220n8; and redundancy of affect, 220n6; and virtual bodies, 238n3 McAlmon, Robert, 67, 163–65; and Albert McKisco, 163–65; Being Geniuses Together; 166–7; and Fitzgerald, 164–65; and homosexual accusations, 163–65; and Kay Boyle, 166–67, 245n18; and marriage to Bryher, 166–67; The Nightinghouls of Paris, 166; as novelist, 67; McClintock, Anne, 173–74, 245–46n3 McCrae, John, “In Flanders Field,” 31, 222n11 McGowan, Eugene, 164 McKisco, Albert (Tender Is the Night), 79, 88, 162, 169, 182, 228n6, 245n2; and “a pansy’s trick,” 64–65, 228n6; “plagued by the nightingale,” 164–65; and Robert McAlmon, 65 McKisco, Violet (Tender Is the Night), 162– 63, 167, 169 Melarky, Frances (Fitzgerald), 164–65, 191–93, 196, 200, 209, 217, 230n10, 247n10 Mellow, James, 46, 225n2, 236n5 Melville, Herman, 9 Mencken, H. L., 3 Merish, Lori, 32 Messenger, Chris: “Out Upon the Mongolian Plain,” 240n18; Sport and the Spirit of Play, 243n6 Metzger, Charles, 90 Metzinger, Thomas, 220n7 Meyer, Adolf, 11, 117, 119, 131, 171 Michaels, Walter Benn, 171, 181 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 153 Milford, Nancy, 236n5 Milner, Jean-­Claude, and anagrams, 240n16 Millais, John Everett, 235–36n3; “Ophelia,” 236n3 Milton, John, 153, 243–44n14, “Nativity Ode,” 153; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 153, 243–44n14 Mitsoglou, Elsa, 223n15, 225n3, 243n7

276 / Index Mizener, Arthur, 121, 178, 229n10, 237n14; The Far Side of Paradise, 237n14, 246n7 Modernity: as sentimental environment, 16; mistrust of sentiment in, 27; Molly Make-­Believe, 34, 223n16 Moore, Marianne, 163, 165–66; and the female nightingale, 165; “Marriage,” 165– 66, 244n16 Moran, Lois, 34–35, 88, 124, 196, 221n5; Just Suppose, 35; Stella Dallas, 35 Mosby, John, 224nn19–20, 227n12 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 107 Murphy, Gerald, 102, 163, 222n8; and “rare” sentiment, 222n8 Murphy, Sara, 11, 84–85, 102, 154, 163, 226n4

ters imaginary, 56; as wife of Hosain Minghetti, 54–55 Nowlin, Michael, 182, 237n16; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles, 240n18 Nurses: and Florence Nightingale, 157–60; and Sarah Gamp, 168–86; and Victorian nurses, 149–50, 169; Dick Diver as, 168–74; real and imaginary in Tender, 149–50

New Historicism, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 183; Beyond Good and Evil, 60 Nightingale, Florence, 16, 151, 155, 157– 60, 165, 168–69, 172, 247n13; and hospital reforms, 158–60; as Lady with the Lamp, 158–59, 167; Notes on Nursing, 158; and Q ueen Moon, 158–60; and Q ueen Victoria, 158; as sentimental Victorian, 157–60; as war hero, 158–60 Norris, Frank, McTeague, 185, 247n13 North, Abe (Tender Is the Night), 28–30, 33, 39, 41, 53, 67, 69–70, 98, 229n8, 241n19; and Abraham Lincoln, 139, 141; and anagrams, 139–41; and Elsie Speers, 56–57; and manuscript “encounter” with Dumphry, 229n8; and “plagued by the nightingale,” 162–63; and racial refraction, 139, 241n20; as uncanny double of Jules Peterson, 141– 42 North, Mary (Tender Is the Night), 28, 30, 33, 48, 168–69, 172, 182, 186, 241n21, 248n7; and affair of the “bathwater, 55; as cross-­dressing sister, 56; and maternal imagery, 151; as “mother” to Dick Diver, 57; and multiple roles, 57–58; 248n7; and name association, 57; and two sis-

Parallax, 5, 130; and absorption, 251n9; and “chiasmic” construction, 80; and re-­ doubling of self, 5; and saving the sisters, 117; and sentiment, 5, 117; Žižek on, 59 Parker, Hershel, “Sober Second Thoughts,” 220n5 Patch, Anthony (The Beautiful and Damned), 12–15, 234n13, 248n6; and romance and sentiment, 13 Perkins, Maxwell, 3, 15, 161, 164, 243n9, 246n5 Peterson, Jules (Tender Is the Night), 39, 83, 88, 97, 100, 130, 240n18; as anagrammatic body, as double of Abe North, 140–42; and Dick Diver’s “key,” 144– 45; as double of Fatty Arbuckle, 143; as minstrelized, 141 Pitt, Brad, 241n21 Picasso, Pablo, 139 Pickford, Mary, 34, 49, 66, 192, 223n16, 248n7, 248n8; as Little Lord Fauntleroy, 195; as the Little Princess, 195 Piper, Henry Dan, 71 Plato, 12, 176 Polchin, James, 198 Polk, Noel, 198 Poovey, Mary, 50, 131, 146, 158–59; and the “Nightingale nurse,” 243n8

Ophelia (Hamlet), 15, 104–10, 125, 209, 236n4; and drowning, 109–10; and the Eczema Woman, 105; and father fixation, 109–10; and Millais painting, 236n4; and Nicole Diver, 104–10; and pansies, 106; and Rosemary Hoyt, 104– 5, 109; and sexuality 106–9 Owen, Wilfred, 28

Index / 277 Popeye (Sanctuary), 104, 187, 200–209; and Horace Benbow, 201–3, 205; and Little Lord Fauntleroy, 200; and sexual inadequacy, 201; as “vicious” and “depthless,” 200 Porter, Katherine Anne, 166 Prigozy, Ruth, 195, 229n7, 243n10, 248n4, 248–49n8; and D. W. Griffith, 248n4, 248n8; “From Griffith’s Girls to Daddy’s Girl,” 229n7 Propp, Vladimir, 74 Pynchon, Thomas, 7 Pugmire, David, 8 Q ueen Moon, 149–57, 167, 176; and Fitzgerald’s absorption, 149–55; in Keats’ “Ode,” 149–50; and the maternal breast, 152; and “rare” sentiment, 155; and “starry fays,” 154–56; and women in Tender, 149–51 Raleigh, Walter, 162 Rappe, Virginia, 143–44, 241n22 Ray, Man, 140 Rasmussen, Eric, 116 Reading: and the uncanny, 241n23; as transference, 11 Refractions, 15; in narration, 83–84; and Nicole Diver, 84–85; and parallax, 89, 117; and sentiment, 83–85 Rennie, Thomas, 117 Richardson, John, Picasso III, 244n15 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 86 Ross, Cary, 187, 198 Rousseau, Jean Jacques: and sentimental paradigm, 97; Confessions, 12, 44; Letter to D’Alembert, 97 Royle, Nicholas, 144, 238n5, 239n10 Rupert, Jennifer, 237n15 Ruvoli, JoAnne, 236n6, 240n12 Sachs, Maurice, 244n15; as source for bathing drawers scene in Tender, 244n15; as source for Francisco in Tender, 244n15 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 16, 104, 109, 188–92, 197–209, 249n9, 249n12, 249n15; dying infant in, 203; and Faulkner’s emo-

tional life, 198–99; and incest imagery, 197–200; sexual imagery in 197–203 Sayre, Rosalind, 226n4 Scarry, Elaine, Dreaming by the Book, 222n7, 223n14 Schiff, Jonathan, 225n1, 225n2; and Dick Diver’s counter-­transference, 225n2 Schweizer, Harold, 237n13 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 4, 37, 183; Between Men, 80; and “ballistics” of the sentimental, 9; Epistemology of the Closet, 15, 60, 62, 79, 183, 246n9; figuration as vulgarity, 40; sentimentality and ressentimentality, 183–84; and sentimental sites, 23; and sentiment as structure of relation, 23, 247n12; and sentiment “repalpated,” 225n24; and “targeted embodiment of sentimentality,” 79, 184, 246n9 Sentiment: and aesthetic resonance, 21; and affect, 6, 36, 146, 182; and anagrammar, 216; and audience, 98; and authorship, 138–39; in The Beautiful and Damned, 13–15; and beauty, 216; broken promises and forms in, 16–17; and charm, 7, 70–72, 74, 76, 126, 130; coded as nostalgia, 7; and community of taste, 27; and completing Tender, 209; as complex form of modernity, 10; and corruption of affect, 36; as cover for sexual warfare, 87; as creative contradiction in Fitzgerald, 16–17; criti­cal derision about, 23; and cubism, 127–31; as cultural formation, 2; and the culture industry, 17; and desire, 9; and Devereux Warren, 41; and displacement of gender, 196–97; and Diver dinner party, 25–27; and ego boundaries, 94; and emotional imaginary, 7, 169; as excess emotional capital, 24; as female, 13; and feminist criticism, 16; and flow, 124; and Freudian love, 22; and the gap, 5, 41, 117, 211, 218; and gay sources of charm, 78; and gendered images, 62; and Gold Star Mothers, 36–37, 134; “good” and “bad” sentiment, 36; growing out of scene, 32; and “heart going out,” 26; and heightened

278 / Index emotional ground, 8; and helping professions, 17; and heteronormative narration, 73; and identity politics, 9, 16; and inadequacy before mass suffering, 28; and incest, 87; and “insulting closeness,” 183; and Kant, 1; and keepsakes, 27– 28; as key to Fitzgerald’s fiction, 125– 26; and languid affects, 1; and limits of bodily integrity, 17; and literary heroines, 86; and male sentimentality, 184– 85; and manipulation of feeling, 4; and the maternal, 167; as mediated by romance, 7; and melodrama, 34; and mise en scene, 140; mistrusted in modernity, 27; and modernism, 7, 129; and modern signification, 23, 87; and mourning, 28, 45, 71–72; and movie love, 22; multiple points of view in, 128; and narrative ethics, 32; as neoliberal power/knowledge, 16; and nineteenth century novels, 86; nostalgia for, 159; as over-­determined, 13; and parallax, 5–6, 11, 73, 117, 128, 211; as popu­lar, 13; and popu­lar memory, 30–32; and postmodernism, 7; in psychoanalytic praxis, 114; as “rare” sentiment, 23, 25, 27, 218; and reading, 24, 40, 98; and recovery of the past, 39; and refraction, 15, 32, 45, 83–85, 128– 29, 142; and relational transaction, 5; as “re-­sentimentalized,” 5; resentimentalized, 73; as response to suffering, 40; and romance, 150, 167; as sadomasochistic identification, 21; and saving Dick Diver, 124; and saving the sisters, 117, 175; as sec­ond-­order emotion, 218; and sec­ond–order representation, 182; and seduction, 6, 32, 87, 156, 196; seduction and sympathy in, 56, 94; and sentimentality, 7–10, 32–33;as “spiritual rouge,” 12; and “spots” of time, 38; and sympathy, 9, 15–16, 21, 94–95, 129, 134, 157; and surrealism, 127–31; as temperamental imperative, 2; as “tender,” 4; and Tender’s deep structure, 144; and touch, 41; twentieth-­century critique of, 16; as twentieth-­century pejorative, 16; and the uncanny, 78, 135, 146; as “vicious”

sentiment, 23, 218; and Victorian sentiment, 12, 23, 37; as violation, 233n3; as “whole-­souled,” 23, 32; and World War I, 28–33; and writing, 93 Sentimentality, 1, 61; and distortion, 7; and manipulation of feeling, 4, 8; as masking the uncanny, 134; and mass audience, 9; and melodrama, 7; and sentiment, 7, 32; and Shirley Temple, 196; as “spiritual rouge,” 12; and taste, 8; as “tender,” 4; as “vicious,” 68 Shaftesbury, Lord, 9, 220n10; Characteristics of Men, 233n1 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 44; Frankenstein, 44 Showalter, Elaine, 105–6; “Representing Ophelia,” 105 Sibley-­Biers, Caroline (Tender Is the Night), 181; as cross-­dressing sister, 56 Sklar, Robert, The Last Laocoon, 228n1 Smith, Adam, 9; A Theory of Moral Sentiments, 221n2 Smith, Felipe, “The Figure on the Bed,” 240n18 Smoller, Sanford J., 245n18 Sound and the Fury, The (William Faulkner), 199, 204–5, 249n9; Benjy Compson in, 199, 204–5, 249n12; Candace Compson in, 197, 199, 204–5; Jason Compson in 199, 204–5; Q uentin Compson (brother in), 204–5; Q uentin Compson (niece in), 205 Speers, Elsie (Tender Is the Night), 46, 154, 221n5, 224n19, 227n12, and dialogue with Dick Diver, 56; and flirting with Dick Diver, 227n14; and husbands, 227n12; and maternal imagery, 56, 151; and Mary North, 56–57; and nursing, 173; and resemblance to Baby Warren, 50–51 Spenser, Edmund, 162 Spielberg, Steven: AI, 196; Schindler’s List, 238n2 Spilka, Mark, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny, 190 Spinoza, Baruch, 35 Squires, Mildred, 117

Index / 279 Stalin, Joseph, 58 Star Wars, 31 Stahr, Monroe (The Love of the Last Tycoon), 60 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 132; and Fitzgerald’s refractions, 240n17; The Making of Ameri­ cans, 163; Tender Buttons, 142, 240n17, 241n21; and the uncanny, 240n17 Steiner, Wendy, Colors of Rhetoric, 128, 232n25, 238n1 Stendhal, 185; Scarlet and Black, 185 Stern, Milton R., The Golden Moment, 228n1 Sterne, Lawrence, A Sentimental Journey, 221n2 Stone, Harry, 179 Stowe, Harriett Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 33 Strachey, Lytton, 158 Stuart, Jeb, 160 Surrealism, 15, 100, 127–31; and “cobra women” in Tender, 133–34; and collage, 129; and dancers, 141; and disparate forms, 128; and dolls, 138; and lost objects, 128, and mannequin bodies, 133; and parallax future, 133; and surreal substitutions, 145; and World War I wounds, 239n11 Swenson, Kristine, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction, 243n8 Tarkington, Booth, 138 Taylor, Eugene, Shadow Culture, 236n8 Temple Black, Shirley, 34, 66, 124, 192, 223n17; as early childhood star, 34; and Fitzgerald’s overture to, 195–96; and Mary Pickford, 195; Young People, 35 Tender, 3, 170; as legal and financial term, 4; and sentimental relation, 4; and Tender Buttons, 241n21; as trope, 4 Tender Is the Night, and absence of mothers, 151–52; as affective fiction, 11; anagrams in, 139–42; and animating the Fitzgerald sisters, 44–48, 56; and ballet imagery, 241n19; battlefield lecture in, 14; and beauty, 4, 16; the Cardinal’s palace in, 132–33; and charm, 15, 130; coda to, 217–18; and “collating the sen-

timentalities,” 120–25; and Colonel Diver (Martin Chuzzlewit), 245n2; condensation and repetition in, 131; and criti­cal difficulties, 1, 23; and criti­cal estimates, 2; “detachment in,” 132, 144– 45; and dissolution of romantic hero, 15; Diver dinner party in, 12–14, 24– 27, 152–53; and Esther Summerson, 191–92; as Fitzgerald masterwork, 2; as Fitzgerald’s richest novel, 2; and form, 127; and the funicular, 234n10; in the gap, 128–29; “General Plan,” 198; and gold as value, 180–85; and gold star mothers, 14, 18–20, 36–37, 129, 132, 151–52, 188; and “harlot’s mind,” 13; incest and homosexuality in, 75; and incest plot, 31, 50, 126; Keats in 160–61; and male absorption, 15; maternal fantasies in, 130; and matricide, 15, 184; and modernism, 127; meanings of, 3; and multiple drafts, 11; narrative arc in, 119; as narrative palimpsest, 130; 1951 version, 5, 42, 85, 126, 227n13, 228n15; 1934 version, 5, 42, 85, 126, 227n13, 228n15; and novel as invasion of privacy, 40; nursery in, 149; and “nursery of a continent,” 172; and nurses, 149– 50, 158, 168–86; and “office,” 9–13; ­Ophelia in, 104–10; and outing sentiment, 15; paradigmatic sentimental scenes in, 16; and parallax gap, 7, 43; paternal fantasies in, 130; psychoanaly­sis and literature in, 11; and queering the text, 15; and refraction, 41, 43; relation of “gay” to “incest” in, 61; and relation to Gatsby, 23; and romance, 1; romantic hero in decline in, 16, 62; roster of women in, 247n12; and routes crossing, 10; and schizophrenic narration, 192; seduction in, 9–13; and sentiment abandoned, 40; sentimental contradictions in, 16; and sentiment’s range, 126, 210; and sentimental circulation, 43; and sentimental form, 11; and sentimental materials, 131; and sentimental perception, 98–99; and sentimental poetry, 52–53; and sentiment’s strengths, 3; as sexual

280 / Index madhouse, 197; and significant form, 189; and Silas Marner, 192; sympathy in, 9–13; and Tender Buttons, 241n21; and “touch,” 79; tragic hero in, 15; and triumph of modernism, 10; and the uncanny, 130–31; vicarious ressentiment in, 183–84; as “vicious tract,” 197; and violence, 16; “whole-­souled” sentiment in, 197; and World War I, 28–32 Thalberg, Irving, 248n7 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 3, 31, 189; and “real sentiment,” 13; and sentimental education, 12–13 Tillman, Lynne, Ameri­can Genius, 116; 236n10 Toles, George, 224n22, 240n17 Tomkins, Silvan, 219n2 Townsend, Dabney, 4, 14 Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination, 21, 210 Turgenev, Ivan, 188; Smoke, 188 Turnbull, Andrew, 48, 51, 178, 180, 236n5; Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 8 Twain, Mark: and Huck Finn, 190; and Tom Sawyer, 190; Huckleberry Finn, 28, 75, 247n2 Uncanny, 15, 76–778, 127–46, 179; and anagrams, 139–42; and Arbuckle-­Diver parallel, 142–44; and conversion to sentimental response, 135; and displacement of race and gender, 140–41; heimlich in, 130, 144, 146; and language “thinking,” 146; as primary intensity of affect, 146; and psychoanaly­sis, 239n10; and reading, 131, 134–35, 241n23; and the return of the repressed, 131; as sentimental, 130, 134–35, 146; unheimlich in, 130, 144, 146, 212 Undine, 30–31 Verne, Jules, 30, 158; Around the World in Eighty Days, 31; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 31 Wagner-­Martin, Linda, 113, 236n5 Ward, Wendy, 234n10

Warner, Susan, 33 Warren, Baby (Tender Is the Night), 49–51, 58, 112, 154, 172; and the gold standard, 181–83; and maternal imagery, 151; and purchase of Dick Diver, 54– 55; and resemblance to Elsie Speers, 50– 51; and Warren sisters in control, 49– 51; as a baby, 49–50 Warren, Devereux (Tender Is the Night), 41, 45, 47, 58, 61–62, 76, 80, 85, 92, 129– 30, 151, 160, 186, 199, 201, 203; and Dick Diver as avatar, 50; as degenerate, 215; and doctors, 74; and doubling Dick Diver, 231n16; and D. W. Griffith, 248n4; and incest, 189; incest and kinship, 80; and “More Than Just a House,” 213, 250n5; and rape of Nicole, 43; and rosary beads, 145–46; and surreal phallus, 146; and uncanny substitution, 141; as “detached” from death bed, 146, 214; as grieving father, 194; as molesting father, 194 Watson, James 197–98, 249n9, 249n14 Watt, Ian, “Impression and Symbolism,” 4 Wechsler, Judith, “Performing Ophelia,” 236n4 Wexelblatt, Robert, 200, 230n11 Wiborg, Hoytie, 226n4 Williams, William Carlos, 163 Wolfe, Thomas, 243n9 Wood, Mary E., 236n6 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 234n11; Mrs. Dalloway, 223n14 Woolston, Constance Fenimore, 190 Wordsworth, William, 161, 243n9 World War I: 37; and imaginative writing, 29–31 Wulff, Alex, 228n5 Yallop, Douglas, 144 Žižek, Slavoj, 5, 46, 62, 218, 220n5; and aphanasis, 57; and the gap, 6, 218; and homeostatic balance, 230n13; and libidinal investment, 5; and object cause of desire, 5; and subject’s gaze, 59; and objet petit a, 125; and parallax gap, 24,

Index / 281 59, 85, 218; and sentimental parallax, 79; and two versions of Tender, 5, 59, 117, 227n13, 228n15; Looking Awry, 79; On Belief, 175; The Parallax View, 5, 42, 59, 117, 224n23, 230nn12–13;

The Plague of Fantasies, 57, 85, 125, 220n7 Zurn, Unica, 123; Dark Spring, 237n15, 241–42n24; The Man of Jasmine, 237n15