Tender is the Night (2 page)

I have undertaken two partial readings, each in itself misguided. In the former Dick embodies the flow of a globalizing capital. In the latter he epitomizes an archaic manner which rigidifies that flux. My readings are apparently contradictory, yet their conjunction may be explored since they meet in Nicole, who is the recipient both of Warren's disruptive fortune and of Dick's surety of manner. As such, she is the site of an untenable disturbance: taught to be ‘hard', she is the conduit of all that softens. Fitzgerald locates the origin of her instability within the act of paternal incest.

Early in
Book II
we learn that Dick is a psychiatrist who has taken on, nominally for life, the damaged child of ‘feudal' monies
(142), under a ‘ducal' name (175); in other words, the spoiled daughter of accumulated capital, spoiled by her father. For Nicole Dick creates his sureties, displacing her ‘bad' father by means of the manners of his ‘good' father. Before discussing the narrative implications of the incest trauma, it is necessary to recognize both its centrality and its pervasiveness. Devereux Warren's sexual pathology keeps cropping up.
Tender is the Night
is beset by ill-disguised fathers and under-aged girls. In Rome (city of papal fathers), on his way to court to be tried for striking a plain-clothed policeman, Dick learns that a native of Frascati has been arrested for raping and killing a child: in court Dick cries out, ‘I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—' (256). Disturbed by the recent death of his own father, Dick perceives himself as a child molester because, by transference, he may be, in Nicole's eyes, the molesting father. In which case, Dick is two fathers: the good reverend father and the bad Devereux Warren. Paternity becomes him but is always liable to become something else. He meets Rosemary on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, objects that he has no intention of marrying his daughter Topsy (278) and threatens his son Lanier with divorce (285). As though enough were enough, Fitzgerald cut from the last page of the manuscript the suggestion that Dr Diver of Lockport is ‘entangled' not simply with ‘a girl who worked in a grocery store', but with a sixteen-year-old.

Not all the paternal duplicities relate directly to Dick. The Chilean aristocrat who begs treatment for his homosexual and alcoholic son is called Señor Pardo Y Cuidad Real – I offer in my own defence Dick's warning to Abe North, ‘You can come if you want to play anagrams' (121) – transposed, the Spanish might read, ‘Senior, sorry, I see you Dad for real.' Once witnessed, the indirect exposure of culpable fathers and consenting children proliferates and permutates.
Baby
Warren and
Daddy's
Girl are simply surface clues to an associative network capable of determining interpretation. Both casual and condensed usage contributes to an emergent, if occult, pattern which ghosts characters and modifies action. For example, Dick's cry as he assaults his policeman – ‘first I'll fix this baby' (246) – could pass as coincidence, were it not that within
a page, Fitzgerald notes, across from Baby Warren's hotel, two carabinieri ‘grotesque in swaddling capes', one of them a ‘tall member of a short race' (247). Sustained innuendo triggers a sub-plot pregnant with infantile desire. The same occult design probably prompts Dick to recall Fatty Arbuckle as he relieves Rosemary of her stained Parisian bed linen – Arbuckle's career was cut short by charges of murderous attention to a child below the age of consent. Sexually poisonous adults achieve their nadir in the father of the American artist treated at Zugersee for nervous eczema: she dies ‘imprisoned' in an ‘Iron Maiden' of scab (202) as a result of neuro-syphilis, possibly contracted from her father at conception. Under-aged girls come no younger. The diagnosis is Dohmler's; Dick does not want to hear it, insisting, ‘If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that' (263). Why is he so secretive? During the patient's decline, Dick ‘went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her' (204). The doctor would ‘cherish' the deep ‘mistake' of incest, containing the ‘secret' with the therapeutic advice, ‘We must all try to be good' (204). As an ‘Iron Maiden' his patient is profanely pure and quite beyond sexual exchange; Dick's role as a surrogate good father is consequently eased. To conclude any account of what I would call the incest constellation with this example is to psychologize a sub-plot whose implications are far broader. The associative network should not be hidden within the psychology of one character, or indeed of the author, since Fitzgerald's preoccupation with the social and financial status of the father (good or bad) requires that incest be understood as a trauma within which the sexual and the economic semanticize one another.

The father, according to the incest taboo, must release his daughter into marriage outside the family. Warren's greed is such that he fails in this exchange; he keeps his daughter for himself. The logic of accumulation transgresses the incest taboo, and Dick is hired to make good that transgression. The word ‘cure' would be inappropriate. Dick as the good father supplants the bad father, restoring Nicole to integrity: she is made ‘complete' and ‘hard',
terms carrying a Jamesian freightage. However, restoration involves blocking the trauma. Nicole is denied access to her father's offence. Secret keys proliferate on Dick's person: plainly he is the key to the case, but during Dohmler's clinical report Dick remembers ‘a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet', a key he had hidden in his mother's top drawer (154). Janitorial duties started young. At some level Nicole recognizes Dick as her keeper: she bars Mrs McKisco from the troubled bathroom in the Villa Diana ‘because the key was thrown down the well' (185), and Nicole knows who did it. Her allusion, redolent of nursery rhyme, chimes in with her own earlier letter in which she described Dick as ‘wise behind your face like a white cat' (139). The wise ‘pussy' who joins the key at the bottom of the well presumably sees the solution as incarceration. When – with ‘verbal inhumanity' seeping through the keyholes – the reader finally enters ‘the horror' in the bathroom it is to witness Dick shutting doors:

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 Zürichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn't let me——'

‘Control yourself!'

‘—so I sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?'

‘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——'

Rosemary, back in the salon, heard the bathroom door bang, and stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana. (125–6)

In a room designed for purgation Dick insists on repression. Nicole resists as she has resisted before. Her memory of procedures at the
Zürichsee might be glossed, ‘While at the clinic, among the foolish and the mad, I wished to wear a spread but was given a domino.' ‘Spread' condenses a plot; prompted by stained bed-linen, the word recalls the sheet marked with the blood of Nicole's hymen. Despite ‘spread[s]' declarative openness, the clinical staff gave her a ‘domino' – an elaborate and often sequined mask. When Nicole tried to understand her trauma, her doctors sought to disguise it with the artifacts of mannered wealth. Dick is of their party. He holds the key to her case and keeps the door locked. None the less, the stain and the domino are complementary; if they were not, Dick's therapy could not work. The mask typifies the affluence of a particular class, even as its occasion and incrustation embody those discriminating principles which condense leisure objects into systems of ‘invidious difference' (Henry James). The stain too is a surface dense with comparative information: beneath it lies the father/phallus, but before he can be seen he is displaced by the hotel linen, the clinicians, the domino, Dick, Mcbeth … Though the associative list can be extended, my point remains a simple one – items in both the bourgeois drawing-room and the unconscious solidify through cumulative nicety. The furnishing of each privacy depends upon an absent father; the Victorian interior expresses his consolidating aggression in the market-place, while in the unconscious, according to Fitzgerald, images solicit over-interpretation and designate at the core of their wealth the missing and threatening father.

Dick's task, as a psychiatrist and socialite, is to reduce the paternal threat while maintaining the father's good name. He is therefore an agent who extends the logic and imperatives of bourgeois privacy. Nicole is Devereux Warren's continuity: his first daughter is ‘wooden and onanistic' (168) and will possibly not marry; rebuilt by Dick, the damaged younger child will exchange with her proper mate, that is to say, with a male who can ensure the ‘ducal' group's exclusivity and privilege. Warren's ‘feudal' monies will be safe with Tommy Barban, mercenary in royal causes, opponent of socialism and trainee stock-speculator. Oddly, by preparing Nicole for the right marriage, Dick preserves the fount of his own gifts – the accumulations that foster and give purpose to his manners. As
the Reverend Diver's child, nostalgic for ‘religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes' (67), he cannot afford to acknowledge that the monies of the
haute bourgeoisie
were corrupt, even at their head and point of distribution. He knows, better than most, how ‘a century of middle-class love' finally ‘spent' itself: he could doubtless map ‘the last love battle' and measure to the inch the ‘great gust of high explosive love' (68); incest is very much his Western Front and the end of ‘all [his] beautiful lovely safe world' (68). He says as much on a visit to the trenches around Amiens; however, by globalizing incest Dick gnomically and unanalytically extends the power of the father.

The case obliges him to find paternity everywhere and to encourage the reader and Nicole to make and fear such revelations. At a late stage in their marriage Nicole objects, ‘Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word “father”?' (311). Her rebuke is a measure of her renewal: she ceases to be a child of two fathers and becomes instead her grandfather reincarnate – her voice and ‘white crook's eyes' encourage her to believe that she has ‘gone back to [her] true self' (314). There is, however, nothing regressive about her return, since, in this instance, the displacement of both fathers ensures the viability of the Warren monies. The whole point about crooked grandfathers is that they know how to invest. Nicole, as her grandfather's spirit
circa
1929, would take his money to Hollywood: symptomatically, she marries a man who likens himself to Ronald Colman and who, in her eyes, resembles ‘all the adventurers in the movies' (290).

But I run ahead of myself. To recap: I have argued that, for Fitzgerald, the central sexual act of
Tender is the Night
operates as an economic metaphor, transposing Devereux Warren's sexual greed, in all its irresponsibility, into a symptom of compulsive accumulation. Dick by ‘transference' (134) is associated with the values of a pre-war leisure class. His sureties grant miraculous longevity to the Father (after a brief interview with Dick in Lausanne the apparently dying Warren takes up his bed and walks (271)). None the less, it is important to recognize that the incest motif can be read in another and seemingly opposed way. Seen from within
a longer economic perspective, the act contains a second impacted narrative: it embodies accumulation but simultaneously transgresses limits. By penetrating Nicole, Warren becomes father
and
lover, even as he makes his child into daughter
and
mistress. Incest creates
dis
integral selves through a multiplication of roles which, by analogy, I would liken to a shift in economic emphasis. An intersection between sexual and economic trauma registers precisely how a change in the history of capital changes the history of bourgeois selfhood. For the full and Janus-faced significance of incest in
Tender is the Night
to be recognized some account of a crucial shift in the history of capital is necessary.