Tender is the Night (5 page)

For ‘future' it is tempting to say ‘futures', particularly of 1929, and still more particularly of 1929 viewed from 1934. It should be remembered that
Tender is the Night
was published in 1934, and spans the period from 1917 to the summer of 1929. It would be gratifying to see the Crash as
annus mirabilis
/the time of changes when ‘destiny' shifted from the manifest to the several. What is striking is that, having timed Dick's dive for the summer of 1929 and having provided a glimpse of flame on Wall Street, Fitzgerald
implies calmly that capital survives through structural transformation and that futures, though they should be legion, may not even number two. In a much-quoted passage describing Nicole's shopping, Fitzgerald sets global capital aboard a fast train running anarchically from Chicago to a Parisian shop window; his extended metaphor implies a crash the better to avert it:

as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying … She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it. (65)

Nicole illustrates capital's tendency to recurrent crisis. Her family money ‘contain[s] its own doom' because, by investing in the massive expansion of production during the post-war decade, the Warrens promote overproduction and the attendant dramatic fall in their own profit. The plot has a twist (as incest has two faces): Nicole's graceful buying mirrors capital's self-correcting concern for consumers and consumption. So, standing at ‘the exact furthermost evolution of [her] class' (30), Accumulation's child may yet give a lesson to the daughter of Reproduction and eventually find her ‘grace' in the procedure imitated in the movies. By such indirections do the imperatives of accumulation metamorphose into the necessities of reproduction. The moral is as simple as the story: the market's narrative is self-healing and absolute.

What is initially odd about this passage is that it ignores one of its own fiercest insights: that things are the loci of more or less antagonistic connections between classes. Fitzgerald could at this point be charged with wilful amnesia, except that what he leaves out he points to. Fitzgerald indicates that if ‘love-birds' come tagged ‘chicle factory' then labour makes leisure. There is no need for the critic to slip an unsolicited economic sub-text into
Tender is the Night
, since the novel's dating ensures that 1929 shadows all events; the fact that it has so little final effect is neither ambiguous nor evasive, it is merely decisive. Fitzgerald's muffled Crash implies the continuity of capital. Labour has no future beyond consumerism because capital ensures its own vitality by switching plots.

Once again I return to my two available master-stories – Accumulation and Reproduction. The one archaic, the other curative, each implies different kinds of subject and object. Dick's decisive dive, though less dramatic, is rather more telling than suicides from tall corporate premises. His career involves a long marination in the realm of carefully considered objects, be they beach cushions or words from a couch. His problem in 1929 is that the objects are changing as market practice and the instruments and institutions of capital change. Dick appreciates, but will not make, that particular transition. Instead he disengages himself from his marriage and from the
haute bourgeoisie
, old and new.

Initially the facts of the new life do not support an act of severance and self-revision; indeed, the final chapter repeats the pattern of the larger narrative. Repatriation and return to Buffalo, the last parish of the good father, suggest a ghostly reversion to ‘whole soul[s]', while Dick's choice of subsequent domicile (Geneva), allied to a disruptive association with a ‘girl', indicates that disintegral elements persist. However, several details carry hints of Dick's ‘interior laughter'. The choice of Lockport, given that Dick viewed himself as both key and janitor, is a striking revision of autobiography: the name splits – Nicole's keeper is now a creature of passage between several ports of call. His unfinished manuscript, whose title ‘would look monumental in German' (162) (a taxonomic work, preoccupied with ‘
Uniform … Classification
'), is carried with him as a sexual come-on: the proximity between ‘much admired by the ladies' and the ‘big stack of papers on his desk' (338) is more than suggestive, it is a comic recapitulation of Dick's first love – after all, if his profession got him a wife, why should it not make him a less orderly ladies' man? Just as a Shakespearean sub-plot will often re-perform high doings among the lower orders, so the last chapter of
Tender is the Night
repeats the novel from an entirely different perspective. Dick is no longer a psychiatrist but a general practitioner, and his ‘girl' is now culled from a ‘grocery store' (I am reminded of the girls who ‘worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve' to pay their ‘tithe' to Nicole (65).) Once puns are recognized as a route to social inversion, other terms become loopholes, issuing covert glances towards another class. Dick stops
for a time in Geneva, a town which Nicole locates with an atlas as being in ‘the Finger Lakes' section of New York: since Dick has quit his adoptive class and wanders from town to smaller town to ‘very small town', he doubtless practises or will practise among manual workers. Perhaps her session with the atlas reminded Nicole that she was ‘born hating the smell of a nurse's fingers dressing her' (260); maybe the name even triggers Frau Gregorovious' body-odour, ‘less a smell than an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay' (260)?

Such speculation has less to do with Nicole's psychology than with the novel's tendency to promote the reading of its persons and things from divided and antagonistic social perspectives. Words like ‘Lockport' and ‘Finger,' once set within their associative networks, tend maliciously to distort themselves, hinting at diversity and implying that their diversity rises from social conflict.

However, the double articulation which characterizes the last chapter of the novel is different from that into which the reader is elsewhere invited. The conflicting semantic determinants of ‘Finger' and ‘Lockport' may be traced to a suppressed dispute between voices, each possibility deriving its intention from a markedly different class position. In contradistinction, the broader duplicities of the incest story depend upon and express the changing dynamic of a single class. It is tempting to read
Book III
,
chapter XIII
as a return of the repressed, and therefore as Fitzgerald's exoneration of Lukàcs' judgement that the proletariat (though hidden in puns and masked in simile) is the only radical class, because it sees the entirety of the system from the base (and so must murmur threats through the established meaning of dominant groups). It
is
striking that
Book III
draws attention to servants and features refusals and uprisings amongst underlings, most notably Dick's, but also Frau Kaethe's complaint against Nicole (
Ch. I
); the cook Augustine's assault with a butcher knife, accompanied by the charge that her employer drinks like ‘a day-laborer' (286); prostitutes ‘thin and barbaric' in Nicole and Tommy's hotel room (
Ch. VIII
), and Gausse's kick to Lady Caroline Sibley Biers' backside (
Ch. X
). However, to overemphasize subversion would be to carry reading against the grain towards a pet pathology. For all his sensitivity to
double-directed words and fissured referents, Fitzgerald recognizes that capital – albeit capital in transition – determines semantic collisions. Labour, even in 1934, has to his ear only sufficient voice to whisper from the depths of concluding puns.

It might be objected that my reading of Fitzgerald has made far too much of ambivalence, that multiple meaning has been induced and puns provoked by reference to associative networks that may look all very well in this essay but bear little relation to the pages of
Tender is the Night
. I can only appeal again to Fitzgerald's perception of economic history to explain his proclivity if not for puns then for internally polemical terms. In 1922 Fitzgerald described himself as ‘a socialist' nervous about ‘the people' (Fitzgerald,
Letters
173); in 1932 he described Dick Diver as ‘a communist-liberal-idealist, a moralist in revolt', adding, ‘the hero … is a man like myself brought up in a family sunk from haute bourgeoise to petite bourgeoise' (Fitzgerald, quoted by Bruccoli,
Grandeur
335–6). A reading of the letters suggests that to combine any and all of these terms would be to approximate to the vagaries of Fitzgerald's political position(s). What is clear is that he read some Marx, advocated the reading of Marx and by the late thirties believed that ‘most questions in life have an economic base (at least according to us Marxians)' (
Letters
347). The throw-away parentheses are typical: writing to his cousin Ceci Taylor in 1934 he appends a confidential postscript to a letter preoccupied with the problems of making money from scripts and stories:

P.S. Apropos of our conversation it will interest you to know that I've given up politics. For two years I've gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in … I have become disgusted with the party leadership and have only health enough for my literary work, so I'm on the sidelines … This is confidential, of course. (
Letters
437)

The two-year period in question (1932–4) spans his most concentrated work on
Tender is the Night.
A
Ledger
note of November 1932 reads, ‘Political worries, almost neurosis' (Bruccoli,
Grandeur
347). Just as in the last chapter of the novel Fitzgerald alludes to a class dispute that is contained within a semantic dispute, so, in his letters,
those aspects of his life that threatened the social fabric to which he is committed are bracketed or set to one side. None the less, while writing
Tender is the Night
, Fitzgerald experienced ‘double allegiance' with troubling intensity; his decision to bracket the political, and to interdict family talk about that decision, suggests that a certain leakage of anxiety into the manuscript was inevitable. In this case, the divided semantics which I have been tracing within the novel's language may be said to arise from Fitzgerald's acute, awkward and partially prohibited sense of the interrelations of class and change.

Fitzgerald is not a punster in any simple sense of the word: the valency of his language is the product of significant quibbles within capital. Capital changes, particularly during the merger wave of the twenties and the early Depression years, dividing the bourgeoisie: social planes collide within a class, yielding divided objects, subjects and meanings. As capital perfects its translation from the monopoly form to what has been designated ‘late' or ‘multinational' capital, so its objects and subjects stabilize, at least for a time. The fissured owning-class heals itself and continues (Nicole is ‘cured'). Fitzgerald's quibbling registers a revolution within a class. The instability of his text (also realized in its nine-year multiform gestation, and in its preoccupation with wounds, scars and surface ‘completeness') is a response to a revolution within capital. Because, during the twenties, capital contained pronouncedly different kinds of capital, ‘emergent' and ‘residual' forms necessarily clashed within social and semantic relations. Read historically, Fitzgerald's puns are not playful; behind them, as with so much else in
Tender is the Night
, lie voices arguing for different ways of life.

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