Tender is the Night (51 page)

18
Cardinal de Retz
: (1614–79). Archbishop of Paris (1653–62), but he lacked all ecclesiastical vocation and energetically pursued cabals and conspiracies as a minister to Louis XIV. Fitzgerald may intend some allusion to Dr Diver's role as a ‘spoiled priest' ministering to a competitive social set with the graces of a religious father. See note 5.

19
Louisa M. Alcott or Madame de Ségur
: Louisa May Alcott (1832–88). A writer most noted for
Little Women
(1868–9). Since Sophie Rostopchine, Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) wrote children's books with titles like
Nouveaux contes de fées pour les petits enfants
(1858) and
Les petites filles modèles
(1858), it is to be assumed that the women in question are allusively numbered among the numerous ‘child-women' who populate the novel.

20
General Pershing
: John Joseph Pershing (1860–1948). The American general who commanded the US Expeditionary Force in Europe during the First World War.

21
a Goldberg cartoon
: Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) drew machines and contraptions of great complexity whose function was to perform easy tasks. By 1928 his cartoons were nationally syndicated.

22
Tarkington
: Booth Tarkington (1869–1948). Author of a series of novels about life in the Midwest, most notably
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1918) and
Alice Adams
(1921).

23
a church in Ferrara
: Fitzgerald may be confusing Ferrara with Canossa, scene of Henry IV's humiliating penance before Pope Gregory in 1077.

24
Tad
: Thomas A. Dorgan (1875–1928). His work for the New York
Journal
and
American
was both popular and acerbic. One of a group of cartoonists who, in the 1900s, introduced strip cartoons into the dailies, he was also noted for his political images, particularly for attacks on the power of the Trusts.

25
Cheyne-Stokes tendencies
: A cyclical respiratory pattern characterized by slowing down, stopping for a number of seconds, and then speeding up.

26
Teput Dome
: i.e. Teapot dome, the popular name for a scandal during the presidency of Warren Harding. The scandal broke in 1924 and became synonymous with government corruption. See note 36.

27
Mosby
: John Singleton Mosby (1833–1916). A Confederate Ranger based in Virginia during the Civil War. He started with nine men but by 1865 had eight well-equipped companies; indeed, he was so successful that between 1864 and 1865 he acted as judge and administrator in the north of the state, which became known popularly as ‘Mosby's Confederacy'. As cavalry officer, Mosby is the stuff of legend and as such doubtless appealed to the Reverend Diver (also from Virginia, 222).

28
‘
Miss Television
': Demonstrations of various kinds of experimental television were made in the late 1920s. NBC and CBS opened television stations in New York (1930 and 1931), but to little effect, since pictures were fuzzy, screens tiny and costs enormous. Dick's remark suggests just how far Fitzgerald associates Rosemary with future social and cultural forms.

29
Grant
: Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85). The most capable of the Union generals during the Civil War and eighteenth President of the US. The first of three references (see also 132 and 338). The sustained analogy between Diver and Grant rests on three points of contact: both men drank too much; both presided over corrupt administrations but did not lose their personal integrity, and both experienced cultural periods (the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age) which were characterized by post-war boom and collapse. See Wexelblatt,
Notes on Modern Literature
, 16.

30
Arbuckle case
: Roscoe ‘Fatty' Arbuckle (1887–1933). One of the silent screen's major stars, mainly remembered for his role in a notorious Hollywood scandal. In 1921, after initial accusations of rape and murder, he was charged with the manslaughter (during a wild party) of Virginia Rappe. Tried three times, he was acquitted in 1922, but his career was ruined.

31
‘
McBeth?
': Fitzgerald's hotelier shares the name of Shakespeare's Scottish king perhaps because Lady Macbeth is driven to self-destruction by her inability to erase images of Duncan's blood from her person (Macbeth V.1).

BOOK II

32
Fairy Blackstick
: Named for ‘the ebony wand or crutch' she carries, Thackeray's fairy offers ‘misfortune' as a christening gift and, on being refused entry to a later royal christening, turns a porter into a metal door knocker, whose nose and parts are subsequently much abused. In the context of ‘big stiff' (130) and Dick's thought that it might be ‘nice' to be ‘less intact' in order to ‘build out some broken side' (131), Blackstick adds ethnic coloration to the emergent pattern of phallic instability which attends Dr Diver's name and desires.

33
Kraepelin
: Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926). German pioneer in experimental psychopathology who formulated a highly influential system for classifying psychosis (162) and helped initiate the discipline of abnormal psychology.

34
transference
: A psychoanalytic term referring to a process, during analysis, whereby a patient ‘actualizes' unconscious wishes by ‘transferring' them on to the analyst. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.

35
Daddy-Long-Legs and Molly-Make-Believe
:
Daddy-Long-Legs
: Jean Webster's work of 1912 features a heroine who rises from orphanage to college by way of the generosity of an unknown patron, whom she nicknames Daddy-Long-Legs. The denouement has the college girl discover that her young man is, in fact, he whom she has called ‘Daddy'.
Molly Make-Believe
: Eleanore Abbott's bestseller of 1910 is a fairy story of convalescence, whose innocent and manipulative heroine contrives to cure and marry an arthritic and despairing young man.

36
Devereux Warren
: The sources of the name are probably several: the initials may recall Daddy Warbucks, whose little girl, Orphan Annie, first captivated America as a comic strip in 1924; while Warren possibly derives from President Warren Harding, whose daughter, born to his mistress
Nan Britton, wrote a bestselling memoir,
The President's Daughter
, in 1927. See Prigozy.

37
…
a pantheon of heroes
: Franz's view of Zurich garners a Who's Who of its more notable citizens. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), an antagonist of rationalism and writer on physiognomy whose work influenced Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), the educationalist, who through Fröbel, his most influential disciple, became grandfather of the Kindergarten; Alfred Escher (1819–82) a Zurich-based banker, industrialist and railway baron, and Zwingli (1484–1531), the protestant reformer who made the city the second centre of the Reformation.

38
‘
G't night
—
g't night
': Joins Dick's departure from Gstaad, ‘Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!' (197) and his lament over his father's grave ‘Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers' (224), as a running allusion to the litany of ‘Goonight[s]' and ‘good nights' at the close of T. S. Eliot's ‘A Game of Chess',
The Waste Land.

39
absent himself from felicity a while
: An allusion to Hamlet's dying instruction to Horatio, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile … To tell my story' (V.2). ‘Felicity', in Fitzgerald's usage, is synonymous with Nicole; but for Hamlet it is coterminous with ‘death' – an intertextual conjunction which intimates that Dick and Nicole's liaison is fatal from the first.

40
Mad Anthony Wayne
: (1745–96). Gained his epithet for his style of command during the Revolutionary War. In 1791 Washington appointed him Major-General to the rehabilitated American Army for a ‘successful' campaign against the Northwestern Indians.

41
Marshall Field
: (1834–1906). Chicago-based founder of the Marshall Field retail company, and of one of the city's ‘great feudal families' of whom Dohmler has read (142).

42
Pallas Athene
: Nicole's allusion to the Greek goddess of war, wisdom and the liberal arts may tacitly refer to Athena's birth, full grown and armed, from the split head of her father, Zeus.

43
Ouled Naïl
: An Algerian tribe who were not poor, little or customarily naked. If Nicole were in Algeria she could not hear drums 1,500 miles away, in Senegal. Fitzgerald drew on his short story, ‘One Trip Abroad' (1930) for several of the details of the North African trip. See also Natterman.

44
Timgad
: The largest remains of any imperial city outside Italy, located in North-East Algeria. Biskra (177) is also an archaeological site.

45
Mistinguett
: (1875–1956). The stage name of Jeanne Bourgeois, a French music-hall performer, noted for her performances at the
Folies-Bergère
, the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge.

46
Crœsus
: Last of the Lydian kings (sixth century BC), who introduced the coining of gold and whose wealth was proverbial.

47
‘
… a ghostly echo from a broken wall
': The American artist, enclosed in an ‘Iron Maiden' formed by her own sores, is attended by tangential references to Eliot's work. The ‘subterranean melodies' which afflict her bandaged face owe something to the ‘sea girl[s']' voices at the close of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', while her account of herself as ‘a ghostly echo from a broken wall' alludes to the bats who ‘crawled head downward down a blackened wall' and to ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells' (‘What the Thunder Said',
The Waste Land
). Since these references serve to link the artist, to whom Dick ‘went out … almost sexually', with deathly or poisonous waters, they are part of a systematic network forming between female sexuality and male dissolution.

48
Svengali
: A character in George du Maurier's novel
Trilby
(1894) who, through hypnotic power, transforms the heroine Trilby into a great singer. Nicole's deranged question appears to confuse the hypnotized subject with the hypnotist.

49
Bleuler and the elder Forel
: Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939): The Zurich-based physician and psychiatrist who introduced the term ‘schizophrenia', and resisted the notion that schizophrenics could not be successfully treated. Or, Manfred Bleuler (1903–), who continued his father's work and introduced the principle of an active community into the relief of mental disorders. Both careers are of relevance to Dr Diver's treatment of Nicole. Auguste Forel (1848–1931): A Swiss psychologist, teaching at the University of Zurich, who used and wrote on hypnosis, but is probably best known for
The Sexual Problem
(1905).

50
was Crucified, Died and was Buried
: The ‘wisdom' to which Dick listens is drawn from the Creed to the Holy Communion (
The Book of Common Prayer
). Christ ‘suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father'. The Reverend Diver having died, Dick's capacity for resurrection is to be doubted.

51
‘
Wall Street
': Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) published
Main Street
(1920). Fitzgerald includes an Italian misappropration of Lewis' title in 1928 to ensure that the shadow of the Crash falls across events towards the close of his own novel.

52
Edna Ferber
: (1887–1968). A Michigan-born novelist and playwright who resided in New York and is perhaps best known for
Showboat
(1926), which was made into an operetta by Kern and Hammerstein (1927).

53
Michael Arlen
: Author of
The Green Hat
(1925), a popular writer whom Fitzgerald considered ‘dead' and ‘second rate' (by 1930), an example of what he too might have become had he gone for ‘half-baked books', rather
than struggling with
Tender is the Night
. See Bruccoli,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur
, 294–5.

54
Groton voice
: Groton is a famous American private school, whose pupils' voices are necessarily aristocratic.

BOOK III

55
Norma Talmadge
: (1897–1957). The oldest and most successful of the three Talmadge sisters. Having been in movies since 1911, her career ended with the coming of sound. In 1917 she formed a successful production company with her husband Joseph Schenck, whom she called ‘Daddy'.

56
cantharides
: A preparation of dried beetles (or Spanish flies) traditionally believed to be an aphrodisiac.

57
bastide
: A small country house in the south of France.

58
Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers
: Milton Stern annotates her name, ‘she is sibling to all the girlboybabies, and her life is the bier of all the broken decalogues.' See Stern, p. 72.

59
John Held
: (1889–1958). Both as an artist and an author, in such books as
Grim Youth
(1930) and
The Flesh is Weak
(1931), Held was considered a leading interpreter of the younger generation of the Jazz Age.