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

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

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

CHRIS MESSENGER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

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Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

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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

Introduction

PART I: IDENTITIES

1. Rare, Whole-Souled, Vicious: Fitzgerald’s Ambivalence toward Sentiment in Book One of Tender Is the Night

2. Replacing the Dead Sisters: Fitzgerald’s Narrative Incorporations of Sentimental Mourning

3. So Easy To Be Loved—So Hard To Love: Sentiment, Charm, and Carrying the Egos

PART II: REFRACTIONS

4. Sentiment and the Construction of Nicole Warren Diver

5. Ophelia, Zelda, and the Women of Tender Is the Night

6. The Uncanny in Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Imagination

PART III: INFLUENCES

7. The Queen Moon Is On Her Throne: Fitzgerald’s Maternal Hero Plagued By Keats and Florence Nightingale

8. How Many Women Is Power: Dickens’ Sarah Gamp and Ventriloquizing the Sentimental

9. Sanctuary and Little Lord Fauntleroy: Sentiment, Sensation, and Two Faces

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

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

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

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

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 always 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 critical 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, 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 smokily 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.

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.

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 undervalued. 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 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 inclusive 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 Symbolism 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 "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 acknowledging 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 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 Zelda’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 metacritically 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 psychoanalysis 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