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Tender Is the Night and Ode to a Nightingale

This post is for my dad. When I told him I was reading his copy of Tender Is the Night, he said it was beautifully written, although he didn't remember the plot, and that it felt more like a movie than a novel.


I read Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” at the end of last semester, but it has taken me one lecture, one final examination, and one month to fully understand how keen and profound its portrait of man’s romantic desire, and ultimate failure, to transcend physical bounds of the body and self is. To “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget…The weariness, the fever, and the fret” is the speaker’s wish, embodied by an elusive Nightingale nested “In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,” who “Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”


Slipping into intentional inebriation and imagination, Keats’ speaker seems to have become one with birdkind, exclaiming, “Already with thee! tender is the night,” though shadows and doubts emerge quickly: “But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”


These two quotes could be the epigraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, a shimmering, dreamlike tale of the American couple Dick (decent psychiatrist in the 30’s sense, where treatment for anything was to live in Switzerland for a few months) and Nicole (wealthy woman, diagnosed “schizophrene,” and patient to Dick) and the infatuations which lap and recede within a tumultuous circle of friends and lovers. Set in and in between classic upper-crust-y expatriate haunts — the Hotel du Cap, German spas, French cathedral towns, the Italian frontier — Tender Is the Night masterfully employs broad spans of setting to depict the buildup and breakdown of Nicole and Dick’s relationship. The introduction of the charming woman-child-actress Rosemary Hoyt (Dick falls hard for her) and Nicole’s expanding awareness of just how much of her life has been dictated and prescribed against her will accelerate the devolution of the Diver marriage. Fitzgerald details all of this with an aching, beautiful intensity, pulling lines that feel simultaneously weightless and forceful out of a warm, balmy summer breeze. It smells of salt and roses.


In the third part of the novel, Nicole considers, “from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition, not just an image on his mind” (277). This realization, beyond being a self-affirming, encouragingly resolute statement of independence, closely mirrors Keats’ first two lines of his final stanza: “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” Fitzgerald and Keats’ shared motif of man’s break from oneness is echoed again and again in the final parts of Tender Is the Night, with Dick in the shape of the seductive, narcotic Nightingale and Nicole as the one who must necessarily struggle free from its spell. These roles are manifested fully at the very end of the novel, where Nicole is revealed as birdlike, light and free: “For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety – she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as...wings” (280). Dick, on the other hand, remains insular, contained, centralized: “He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him, his own, not hers” (300).


Ultimately, unbound and discharged, Nicole departs from Dick’s vision of life within a world “completely his own”: “Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever nearer to what she had been in the beginning” (298). Through Nicole, Fitzgerald rejects the Nightingale’s song, the desire to lose oneself into the ether, the pursuit of integration at the expense of one’s own personhood. Our softened and unlikely heroine, always fragile but deeply knowing, retakes herself, stumbles away from the spell, abandoning the entrapment of apparent unity in favor of herself. Dick, on the other hand, faces a less agreeable future, intoxicating, heady, and imprisoning: "in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee…he had made his choice…chosen the sweet poison and drunk it” (302).


Cover Image: Detail from Portrait of Keats by Joseph Severn




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