Tender Is the Night Summary: Fitzgerald's Riviera Novel of Love and Collapse
What it is about
Published on 12 April 1934, Tender Is the Night was the fourth and final novel F. Scott Fitzgerald completed. It is set on the French Riviera in the closing years of the Jazz Age, and it follows Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife Nicole, who was once his patient. The book traces their rise and their long unravelling: Dick's slide into alcoholism, Nicole's struggle with mental illness, and the slow reversal of power between them.
The opening movement belongs to an outsider. Rosemary Hoyt, a seventeen-year-old actress, is staying at a nearby resort with her mother when she falls in with the Divers and their circle of American expatriates. To Rosemary, Dick and Nicole look like the most enviable people alive. She becomes infatuated with Dick and grows close to Nicole. Then she starts to sense that something is wrong underneath, and a guest at a party, Violet McKisco, says she witnessed Nicole having a nervous breakdown in a bathroom. Tommy Barban defends Nicole and calls Violet a liar. Violet's husband Albert duels Barban on the beach. Both men miss.
From there the group moves on to Paris, where Rosemary tries to seduce Dick in her hotel room. He refuses her, though he admits he loves her. A scandal follows that Dick quietly covers up. Only then does the novel reach back into the past to explain how Dick and Nicole met at all.
The main characters
Dick Diver is the centre of the book. In spring 1917 he is a young doctor visiting the psychopathologist Franz Gregorovius in Zurich. There he meets Nicole Warren, a wealthy young woman whose mental illness followed sexual abuse by her father. They exchange letters. Franz believes Dick's friendship is good for Nicole and allows them to see each other. Nicole becomes infatuated; Dick develops what Fitzgerald frames as Florence Nightingale syndrome, and decides to marry her in order to give her lasting emotional stability. That decision shapes everything that follows, because it makes their marriage a treatment as much as a love affair.
Nicole is both patient and heiress. Her money pays for Dick's partnership in Franz's Swiss clinic, which quietly puts her in the stronger position even while she is the one being cared for. Rosemary Hoyt is the young outsider whose arrival exposes the cracks, and who later becomes a successful Hollywood star while Dick declines. Tommy Barban is the hard, physical counterweight to Dick's charm. Franz Gregorovius represents the profession Dick is losing his grip on.
The themes
The novel sets love and medicine against each other and lets them corrode. Dick marries a woman he was supposed to be healing, and the roles never fully separate. He is husband, doctor and support system at once, and the cost of holding all three falls entirely on him.
Money and class run underneath that. The Warren wealth buys the clinic, the villa and the life. Dick's professional standing becomes dependent on a fortune that is not his, so when his drinking starts to threaten his practice, his ownership share is bought out by American investors after Franz suggests it. The glamour of the Riviera set is never free.
Then there is the corrosion of personality itself. Dick's self-confidence and friendliness curdle into sarcasm and rudeness. His unhappiness about what he could have been feeds the drinking, and the drinking makes him an embarrassment in company and at home. Fitzgerald drew closely on his own life. He began the book in 1925, after The Great Gatsby, and wrote it through years in which his wife Zelda's mental health deteriorated badly and required extended hospitalisation. He drank heavily, borrowed money from his editor Max Perkins and his agent Harold Ober, and wrote commercial short stories to stay afloat. He finished in autumn 1933.
The ending
Stop here if you do not want it. After his father's death, Dick travels to America for the burial and then to Rome hoping to see Rosemary. They have a brief affair that ends abruptly and painfully. Heartbroken, Dick gets into an altercation with the Italian police and is beaten; Nicole's sister gets him out of jail. The public humiliation accelerates his drinking. The marriage disintegrates as he pines for Rosemary. A lonely Nicole begins an affair with Tommy Barban, divorces Dick and marries Barban. The patient recovers. The doctor does not.
Why it still matters
The title comes from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale". Fitzgerald considered the novel his masterwork, though the response on release was tepid, with criticism aimed partly at its flashback structure. Two versions exist: the 1934 original, which uses flashback, and a chronological reordering prepared by Malcolm Cowley from Fitzgerald's notes, first published in 1948. Its reputation has grown steadily. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it 28th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. For readers who know Fitzgerald only through Gatsby, this is the darker, more personal book, and the one he cared about most.
