Fitzgerald’s Follies
In The Praise of Folly, in 1509, Desiderius Erasmus personified folly as a goddess. She develops the thesis that folly is good and that it is deserving of praise. Folly remarks on her own ubiquity — since we all, the wise and the unwise, live in folly’s grip. “Fortune herself,” Folly tells us, “the directrix of human affairs, is so thoroughly of a mind with me that she always has been most hostile to the wise.” Socrates figures repeatedly in The Praise of Folly, his life a spectacle of wisdom turned to folly. Socrates is the wisest man in a city said to favor wisdom, and after being put on trial for no actual crime he is compelled to commit suicide. This exemplary teacher is executed — absurdly — for corrupting the morals of the young. His gift for wisdom had been a death sentence.
To make her case, Folly must go beyond the claim that folly is inescapable. She offers two separate explanations for its intrinsic worth. She contrasts “the mischief of wisdom” to “the enchantment of folly,” an enchantment that can resemble delirium — “for I fill the mind with a sort of perpetual drunkenness; I glut it with joys [and] dear delights.” In the end, folly is an incitement more to art than to inebriation. Poets are “of my faction,” Folly observes; “destroy the illusion and any play is ruined.” Illusion is art and art illusion, a fortunate state of affairs, for from art comes folly’s sweetness and its ability to enchant.
At the highest reaches of folly there is love. Though Erasmus pokes fun at the self-importance and the pieties of theologians and clerics, he emphatically does not equate folly with nihilism or wisdom with hypocrisy. “The attribute of wisdom is meet for God alone,” Folly concludes. Always at hand, undivine human folly merits forgiveness. Folly is “so acceptable to the heavenly powers that forgiveness of its errors is assured, whereas nothing is forgiven to wisdom.” Folly furnishes the reason and the motive for love, and “he who loves intensely no longer lives in himself but in whatever he loves.” Folly is divinely generous. The more one “can depart from himself and enter into the other [through the folly of love], the happier [one] is.”
Folly has a unique purchase on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biography and a unique purchase on his literature. Fitzgerald is the most foolish of American writers. He was foolish in his successes, throwing away his time and talent on short-lived celebrity and on lucrative ephemera, chasing the dollar and compromising his immense talent. He was not less foolish in his many failures. His two finest novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, were commercial flops. He himself fell into penury in the 1930s, his wife Zelda having descended into madness. Fitzgerald overdid something to which Erasmus’ Folly admits — that she had been raised up and nourished by Bacchus. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism constrained his literary output and led to his premature death at the age of forty-five. The adult Fitzgerald could not take care of himself.
We do not associate Fitzgerald with anything like wisdom literature. He never wore a beard, that “ensign of wisdom,” according to Erasmus’ Folly. He could not be confused with Tolstoy, who did have a beard and who broached the biggest and the best questions, boldly titling a novel War and Peace. (Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise, in which this side of paradise — a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke — is more or less a brilliant undergraduate career at Princeton University.) Fitzgerald did not even write novels of ideas. He was no Thomas Mann, no communicant with the philosophical heavyweights, no worldly interpreter of high politics. Until his death, Fitzgerald agonized about not being sufficiently educated or well read. He never graduated from Princeton, and it bothered him.
In The Great Gatsby, the book that will always define him, Fitzgerald expends marvelous prose on a small and insignificant man. It is a perfect novella to depict the dreams, the extravagance, the alleged greatness of a bootlegger whose golden girl got away. Gatsby lacks any guiding wisdom. He lacks gravitas. The incognito protagonist, he lacks a real profile even in his eponymous novel. He is an empty vessel of social climbing and romantic longing who embraces the folly-filled tawdriness of his cultural moment. Gatsby is the boy who never outgrew high school, not to mention college (which he falsely claims to have attended). His shallowness and frivolity would have made him a bit player in War and Peace, a petty officer. Or Tolstoy would have chosen to transform Jay Gatsby, to reform him, leading him through a moral awakening. Tolstoy would not have left Gatsby’s folly intact, as Fitzgerald is very willing to do.
According to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and later his literary executor, Edna St. Vincent Millay compared Fitzgerald to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.” A similar image occurred to John Dos Passos: “when he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to be full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as diamond.” Fitzgerald fretted about wasting his diamond-like literary talent on the literature of immaturity, or he was sensitive to the accusation of doing this. In 1934, in an unpublished preface to Gatsby, he wrote of being “kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”
Without cultivating an aura of wisdom, however, the beardless Fitzgerald did write wisdom literature. He wrote it not by denigrating folly, not by dismissing it, and not by treating folly as peripheral to wisdom. Folly and wisdom must be twinned: “one never attains to that renowned wisdom,” Folly stipulates in The Praise of Folly, “which the wise themselves call the citadel of happiness, except by taking Folly as guide.” Folly and wisdom conjoin, and, as Erasmus shows, proximity to folly can be the same as proximity to poetry, to the poetic impulse that silhouettes Fitzgerald’s better writing. Folly is also (as already noted) the path to love, the stimulus to love, and on love Fitzgerald could be austerely wise, as he is in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a virtuoso of the counterfeit, a cipher almost, who loves Daisy with a shocking sincerity and force. The heartless, loveless souls around him have wealth and a solid social position, and little else.
Fitzgerald’s wisdom literature took some time to materialize. First he had to live through different seasons of folly; he had to assimilate a poet’s rigor as a stylist; and he had to reflect on wisdom as such, which he did most cogently in the letters that he wrote to his daughter from 1933 to 1940. An intimate of folly, an intimate of wisdom, Fitzgerald slowly figured out how to translate the spiritual possibilities of folly into enduring art. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby was a feint in this direction, but the full translation came almost a decade later in Tender Is the Night. It recounts the mistakes of a man who travels from emotional abundance and professional distinction to the purgatory of self-defeat and loss. The novel’s wisdom resides not in the tale it tells; the tale is too edged with folly for it to impart wisdom directly. The novel’s wisdom resides instead in the novel’s style, in its manner of telling the tale. Foolish protagonist, foolish life, wise narrative, wise novel. Not by accident does this saddened novel abound in love and poetry. These are the bequests of folly, which demand a measure of wisdom to be perceived, internalized and cherished.
Scott Fitzgerald was an imperfect father. Often absent, he was self-absorbed even by the standards of ambitious writers, and his alcoholism affected his daughter directly. It damaged her father’s health and must have been terrifying to behold. Already in the 1920s alcoholism accrued to the Fitzgerald myth, a myth that lived in the public domain, and by the 1930s this myth dovetailed with another myth — of Fitzgerald’s diminishment, of his loss of stamina, of his fading from the scene and not writing. It was his destiny to have become a relic of the Jazz Age. In Fitzgerald’s biography, the motif of squandering is omnipresent — squandered youth, squandered literary potential, squandered time. Fitzgerald embeds this motif in his fiction, though in his letters to his daughter he consciously inverts the motif of squandering that haunts so many of his novels and short stories. With acuity of expression and without rhetoric, Fitzgerald tries to get his daughter not to squander her life.
The biographical dimension to these letters is only minimally interesting. Fitzgerald was a worried, moralistic, and sometimes preachy father, one of millions. The literary dimension to these letters is far more enriching, for they document his preoccupation with wisdom. His paternal persona was conservative yet un-Victorian. Fitzgerald, who did not want conventional domesticity for his daughter, wanted her to feel the impress of duty, a prerequisite for feeling the impress of art. “All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly,” he informed his daughter. Wisdom proceeds from virtue, and wisdom takes on two separate guises in these letters: the willingness to work hard and the achievement of a writing style. (Fitzgerald’s daughter was an aspiring writer in the 1930s, when he wrote his letters to her.) Style symbolizes something so consequential for Fitzgerald that it could be a cognate for grace. It is achieved not by transcending error but by leaving oneself susceptible to feeling.
Throughout his letters, Fitzgerald implies a complicity between his daughter and himself. Both of them are foolish. Touching on some minor point, he notes that “like me you will be something of a fool in that regard all our life.” Painfully, Fitzgerald places his daughter within a fallen family. He and her mother should never have married. “I knew she [Zelda] was spoiled and meant no good to me,” he confesses. “I was sorry immediately I had married her . . . . The mistake I made was in marrying her.” He criticizes Zelda for “trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead.” Fair or unfair, this criticism reveals the door to wisdom in Fitzgerald’s eyes, which was the vocation of art and the vocation of reading. One enters it through an ambitious apprenticeship to “the thousands dead,” to the books they wrote for us. Put in academic terms, one enters it through the humanities.
Time and again, Fitzgerald pleads with his daughter to love labor. “Please work — work with your best hours,” he exhorts. Reflecting on work, he writes that “wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve,” their wisdom being their foresight and their work. These injunctions take Fitzgerald to an arresting bit of self-criticism, and they encapsulate the strenuous wisdom he is trying to defend: “What little I have accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back — but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line — from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty — without this I am nothing.’ ” The this here is the accomplishment. By “line” he means the choice to write real literature rather than to write for commercial reward. The this repeated three times is also — and more fundamentally — the work itself, the sitting at the desk, which (because true art is at issue) cannot be other than laborious and uphill.
The work Fitzgerald praises in these letters is not tied to marriage or money or status, preoccupied as Fitzgerald could be with each of those subjects. He grudgingly argues for “some calculated path . . . to find your way through the bourgeois maze.” He then hastens to add, “if you feel it [your way] is worth finding.” It may not be. The bourgeois maze is hazardous. Echoing Thoreau, Fitzgerald outlines the precarity of wisdom in a society bent to industry: “Once one is caught up in the material world one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic conceptions of himself, or to know what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.” One does not labor for the bourgeois maze and the burdensome material world. They are obstacles to the formation of literary taste, to the philosophical reckoning with self and, by extension, to a life wisely lived.
Folly and wisdom mingle in these phrases and in these letters. By the wise and tragic sense of life Fitzgerald meant “the thing that lies behind all great careers . . . the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure,’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.” Fitzgerald refers here to Shakespeare and to Lincoln. We are cheated by our mortality, by the obtuseness and malice of others and by our own foolishness. “To say ‘I will do valuable and indispensable work,’ ” and to do so against the grain, “is the part of wisdom and courage.” The work that is indispensable is more than the mere effort to write or to be an artist. It culminates in the painstaking acquisition of a style, not a pose and not a trademark but an internally excellent prose style. Work yields a style that wells up from within. “What you thought and felt,” Fitzgerald tells his daughter about the movement from living to writing, “will, by itself, invent a new style.”
Fitzgerald was born with a gift for prose. In and after college, possessed of his gift, he gained a keen understanding of the literary marketplace. He had gone to college across the river from the center of American publishing. The Fitzgerald legend of the 1920s, of the man about town, arose because he was shrewd enough to construct it. Its constituent elements were: easy, accessible prose; well-made novels and short stories that had a flavor-of-the-month aspect to them, dispatches from a new generation; staged photographs and news stories that asked readers to associate the elegance of the author and of his wife Zelda with his fiction. This is the recipe of American celebrity more typical (with a few twists) of Hollywood. It is not atypical of American fiction — face, reputation, personalized relationship between the public and the famous individual. (It became more typical of writers under the impact of Fitzgerald’s legend.) In the 1930s, Fitzgerald’s friend and rival Hemingway would eclipse him by using the same tools of celebrity. Fitzgerald was at home in the Jazz Age, when conspicuous consumption and hedonistic excess were more in vogue than political zeal, self-styled manliness, or personal sacrifice. He was temperamentally too well suited for frivolity.
Fortuitously, Fitzgerald never gave up on folly. One could imagine an alternative biography for him. He could have jettisoned his earlier self. He could have bid farewell to dissipation, a favorite word of his, and embarked on the journey of a wise man. Perhaps he could have evolved into an engagé writer of the 1930s, another Steinbeck documenting in bleak, hardened prose the travails of the Great Depression. Or he could have elaborated a “late style,” going where the wisdom-loving Tolstoy eventually went — away from illusions and away altogether from the gamesmanship of fiction. When he graduated from writing literature, Tolstoy mostly authored pamphlets and tracts on the moral and social improvement of society. Fitzgerald could have headed back to the Catholicism of his youth. Like Graham Greene or Flannery O’Connor, he could have woven Catholic notions of good and evil into his novels and short stories, and after the parties and the drinking and the meandering this could have been his badge of maturity. Yet Fitzgerald, who had so many ways to become older and wiser, seemed only to grow older.
Skirting the pretense of wisdom, Fitzgerald the writer also had to escape the glibness of his early books and short stories. This was the laborious and uphill work that he mentioned to his daughter. His non-glib literary style would incorporate the antipodes of wisdom and folly — simultaneously lush, seductive, stylish and sober, subdued, meditative, moral. The style itself had three layers. First was an expository prose that channels poetry, that in its cadences comes quite close to being poetry. Second was the incorporation of literary modernism, which ennobles contradiction, tying contradiction to beauty. Third, Fitzgerald borrowed a narrative device from Joseph Conrad. This was to run a story through a narrator, to hold it at arm’s length and to orient it through a retrospective gaze, as Conrad had done in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Thus could folly, the story, be regarded by wisdom, the narrative voice, an encounter that mandates a prose style as amenable to folly as it is to wisdom. It mandates a prose style of intricacy and complexity.
In his letters to his daughter, Fitzgerald brings up Shakespeare and Ecclesiastes as poetry that she should read. Most of all, Fitzgerald writes to her about Keats. He conjures himself as a reader studying Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” until he “caught the chime in it and the exquisite mechanics.” Chime is a musical reference, and this word signifies an essential element of Fitzgerald’s prose style, its undergirding of poetry. (“Tender is the night” is a quotation from Keats.) From Keats and many others, Fitzgerald adopted his preoccupation with the sound and rhythm of words and with their coloration, a musicality of the word. The result is a prose style that is fabulously suggestive, with little intellection in it and without anything point blank — prose melodies drawn from the lyrical description of people and places. The chime that Fitzgerald heard in Keats is not there on the silent page. It sounds in the reader, awakening the reader to a private and subjective performance of feeling and meaning.
Poetry instills music in prose, and as a model Keatsian poetry is minimalist. The words chosen — the machinery assembled by the poet/mechanic — have a delicate economy. Prose can wander if it is left to its own devices; it can pile up; and no author knows this better than the one who is paid by the word, as Fitzgerald often was. Dostoevsky wrote long novels in part out of financial need, and formidable as Dostoevsky the novelist is, he is not a first-rate prose stylist. He, like Fitzgerald, could churn it out. In his best writing, however, Fitzgerald was highly deliberate about his words — a kind of deliberativeness, of carefully chosen diction, that one associates with Keats. Imitation of poetry gave him the power to fold diverging moods into a phrase, an image, a word. Only the mechanics of poetry could generate a prose style that tolerates the diverging moods of folly and wisdom.
Keats died in 1821, more than sixty years before Fitzgerald was born. Bits and pieces of the Romantic era entered into the Fitzgerald myth — Fitzgerald as the Byronic hero whose heart was tortured by love and who died before he should have; but in his prose style Fitzgerald was not a throwback. Rather than reviving Romanticism, he immersed himself in modernism. Though he never wore the mantle of an avant-garde experimentalist, he nonetheless extracted his stylistic tools from modernism: the evocation of a surreal world shaped and shadowed by the human psyche, and the eagerness to convey all that is discordant in the modern city and in the modern person. The tension and the energy of Fitzgerald’s prose style arise from his aesthetic of juxtaposition. Strange as it is for Gatsby to be trivial and great at the same time, a prose style attuned to the irreconcilable can express contradictions with clarity, and it can make them real. A modernist style freed from rationality brought Fitzgerald to the heart of the (not especially rational) interaction between folly and wisdom.
Joseph Conrad inspired Nick Carroway, The Great Gatsby’s narrator. Without Nick, The Great Gatsby would have been a society novel like the ones that Fitzgerald had already published, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned. With Nick, The Great Gatsby becomes the mirror and the image in the mirror, the story and the memory of the story, the thing and its opposite. Nick’s sobriety and moralism are modified by Gatsby’s recklessness and shameless self-creation. Old at heart, Nick is a cautious Midwesterner who cannot condone the Eastern luxuries. Described by Nick, these luxuries are the novel’s archetypal attributes, the reason so many bars and clubs have been named after Gatsby. Conrad’s method of storytelling prompted Fitzgerald to operate in the shadows, between narrative and narrator, and in this space Fitzgerald’s style came into its own. It could convey the wish to be at the party and the regret that one was there, the wish to recall it all in detail and the wish to forget that it ever happened. A supple Conradian style helped Fitzgerald turn ugliness into beauty. The beauty proceeds from the folly, while the ugliness is what wisdom sees. For all its sheen and supposed glamor, The Great Gatsby is a critique of rich Americans and of the ugliness for which they are responsible.
Tender Is the Night exceeds The Great Gatsby. It synthesizes the three elements of Fitzgerald’s style, employing a varied poetic range — ode, elegy, sonnet, epic, tragedy, satire, confession, ballad. Its modernism is self-evident. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald makes a constant claim on freedom of language; its words very often struggle free from their conventional uses. Modernism also furnishes the organizational scheme for Tender Is the Night, a story broken into pieces: middle, beginning, end, beginning, middle. Gaps and disjunction dominate Fitzgerald’s canvas, and Tender Is the Night employs a Conradian narrator, one who goes unnamed. The novel’s narrative voice is omniscient and skilled at prose-poetry, the imperturbable and godlike voice of wisdom. The tale of human folly is entrusted to this voice, which without surprise, without outrage and without rancor seems to expect folly to run its usual course, and so it does.
Starkly cautionary, Tender Is the Night is inviting to moralists. Dick Diver, a Rhodes Scholar, has been blessed with good looks, intelligence, willpower, and charm. He becomes a psychologist, a scholar and practitioner, marries a wealthy patient and slowly starts to lose his life’s thread. He finds himself in thrall to money, to leisure, and to drink. The scholarship trails off and the marriage unravels, Dick having fallen in love with a movie star, for whom he is simply one of a hundred youthful adventures. As many of his friends succumb to midlife despair, Dick follows along. His wife leaves him for another man, and he is banished less by poverty than by rootlessness to upstate New York. His ex-wife, who now and then pretends that “his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena,” knows that he is lost for good. Dick has traveled a cosmopolitan path to obscurity, to the nullity of a life in which everything significant has been mismanaged. The thief who stole his own promise, Dick is a fool who receives a fool’s comeuppance.
Tender Is the Night upholds an elaborate architecture of folly-wisdom. Much as the novel might attract moralists, it is not moralistic. Its architecture has two planes, or consists of two relationships — between narrative consciousness à la Conrad and story, and between style and narrative consciousness. The filter for a story about fools (Dick is not the only one) is a narrative consciousness of luminous wisdom, neither naïve nor especially sorrowful, and a wisdom rigorously uninvested in condemnation. The wisdom of the narrative consciousness interacts with the novel’s style and with the novel’s high poetry. The interaction casts up an insight into mismanaged lives, which is that their folly can be restorative. The beauty in these lives — in all our lives — would not be there without the folly. Dick Diver’s folly is to have loved two women, both of them wrong for him. A wisdom of retrospect clarifies his every misstep, while the folly invests his mismanaged life with richness and with love. Dick’s folly, Tender Is the Night says to us in its style, corresponds to that which is best in him.
Without being obtrusive or even very noticeable, the narrative voice regularly steps outside the story. It comments on its characters and on their evolutions. A knowing and unconfused voice, it wavers between sociology and philosophy, peering far beyond the characters’ passions and misdemeanors. The voice reminds the reader that, though it is set in France, Tender Is the Night is an American story, harboring American meanings, one of which concerns wisdom. As Dick says about Rosemary’s mother, “She has a sort of wisdom that’s rare in America.” The narrative voice confirms this rarity, suggesting that power and money and modern times, “the enormous flux of American life,” have fused into a mass unconsciousness. Americans are heedless, and they think they can get away with being heedless. The narrative voice observes a “tall rich American girl, promenading insouciantly upon the national prosperity.” Enjoying her paradigmatic prosperity, this American girl walks with insouciance, handmaiden to the unexamined life.
Lacking cultural depth, Americans disappoint the narrative voice in Tender Is the Night. This is especially true of Americans in Europe. The narrative voice editorializes about a group of bored American tourists: “no stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing there [in rural France].” Tocqueville, who worried about democracy as a dissolvent of nuance and therefore of the individual, could not have improved upon this description of American restlessness. Fearing the silence of their own solitude, they hope to mistake the thinking of others for their own thoughts. The narrative voice makes a similar point through Rosemary, who is American in her way of being unwise. She was “accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, [and] she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale.” (In a notebook entry in 1924, Fitzgerald wrote that “I’ve talked so much and not lived enough with myself to develop the necessary self reliance.”)
Dick Diver and his wife Nicole come close to separating out the essential for themselves. The novel begins in 1925. The war is over and the Great Depression nowhere in sight, as Dick and Nicole summer with their gifted friends, living lavishly on the Cote d’Azur. The narrative voice explains that the “Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give the transitions their full value.” No tragi-comic grotesqueries for them — not there, not then. They have made leisure civilized and rarified, “representing externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed awkward beside them.” In the word externally is the clue to the story. Internally, Nicole is still a psychiatric patient, still suffering from an abusive father, and internally Dick is unwell. He is wasting himself, looking back occasionally “with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.”
Underneath, Dick is yet another unwise American. As such, he wills himself past success and money and into the endless night of failure. His degeneration elicits no harshness from the narrative voice: it begets tenderness, even if the narrative voice does not indulge Dick. He is romanticized in the novel’s opening pages for the sake of contrast, so that his hell might be maximally dramatic. What the narrative voice tells us — with emphasis — is that Dick’s fall is his fault. No natural or external disaster covers him in misfortune. His folly is his erotic cluelessness, undeniably the same thing that Fitzgerald saw in himself and stated to his daughter — “the mistake I made was in marrying her [Zelda].” I made. The mistake I made, which is the mistake Dick makes twice in Tender Is the Night, is less the mistake of marrying then of falling precipitously in love. A modest two mistakes and the promising young man has reduced his life to “a perilous accident,” and to an accident that he is too weak and too unwise to survive. The peril and the accident expel him from the paradise — from the south of France in 1925. The novel’s narrative conscience is too stern to pity Dick for any of this.
Dick goes astray in love, the narrative voice persuasively argues. Simultaneously, the novel’s style teaches us that Dick lives most expansively and most wisely in his love. The folly pushing his love forward undoes him, and it also makes him, robbing him of his self-discipline and revealing to him that life is poetry and poetry life. The contest between wisdom and folly plays out in this manner, back and forth, back and forth. Given Fitzgerald’s reverence for style, his genius for style, it cannot be said that wisdom triumphs over folly in this novel. Folly comes closer to triumphing over wisdom. It goes where wisdom cannot. It prospers where wisdom cannot. It enlivens in a manner that wisdom cannot. Adult life comes to fruition in the food for thought that folly gathers for wisdom. The wisdom would be pointless without the folly, antiseptic and unnecessary. Where wisdom is by nature astringent and melancholic, folly can be liberating and gorgeous, for folly recklessly affirms and acts and creates. In Tender Is the Night, its vast potential is realized not in narrative, not in character portrayal, and not in philosophizing about life and fate, but in the singular domain of literary style.
Two examples demonstrate folly’s splendor in Tender Is the Night. The first is the moment Dick falls in love with Nicole (around the time of World War I). She is a rich American girl and his patient at a Swiss sanitarium, and she is not at all insouciant. He tries to resist her, cognizant of being her doctor and of her being unwell, intuiting something of his eventual fate. He cannot resist, and “the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.” The novel elaborates on this smile: “she smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him. Minute by minute the sweetness drained into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.”
This passage unites detail, rhythm, and metaphor into a verbal medium at once meticulous and lyrical. It has the insistent motion, the grammar and the diction, of prose. There are pauses but not breaks. As in poetry, though, each syllable and each sound is calibrated for musical effect, the “compact paroxysm of emotion” doubling as a compact paroxysm of multi-syllabic accents. Metaphors fuel the climactic last sentence, a polished gem of expository prose. The willow trees donate their dolcezza to Nicole, and the world’s very darkness is drained away by her moving childish smile, less an enticement than a painterly image of love itself. It is all a poet’s homage to folly, for Dick happens to be making the worst mistake of his life. Yet his loss of self-control causes the world’s darkness to dissipate. Dick has enough folly within him to receive Nicole’s smile, while she passes — minute by minute — the world’s sweetness from the willow trees through herself to him. She is not robbing him of anything: she is bestowing the logic of beauty on his existence. Not to have experienced this moment would have been a mistake more grave and more enervating than the mistake Dick will make by marrying her.
The second example concerns Rosemary, the femme fatale from Hollywood. Dick is married to Nicole; they have two children; and Rosemary is much younger than Dick. She is an object of desire who adores him and who is obviously not right for him. Again he cannot resist. Again he gives in. They cross a line in Paris — not quite into adultery but away from probity. It is the mistake that will definitively destroy Dick, the worst transition of his adult life, the point of no return, the cardinal error. Beset with emotion, Rosemary and Dick ride in a taxi with “no time to cry, and lovers now they fell ravenously on the quick seconds while outside the taxi window the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine smokily through the tranquil rain. It was nearly six, the streets were in movement, the bistros gleamed and the Place de Concorde moved by in pink majesty as the cab turned north.” Dick is turning onto a long series of false paths and dead ends.
A study in foolishness, this passage lays bare the transformative power of love. They are traveling — Dick, Rosemary, Nicole, and their Parisian companions — from entertainment to entertainment. No one is sober, all of them are along for the ride. Paris is just a stage set to them. Dick and Rosemary enter another world in the taxi, falling “ravenously” on themselves, a world that seems an impressionist watercolor, a zone of magical adjectives, each quite simple and yet riotous in their profusion. A twilight that is green and cream fades into the city’s vibrant night. The forgiving tranquil rain distorts the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signage into a shining smoky light. The majesty (pink or otherwise) cannot have been perceived by the two lovers, who are lost in their rapid embrace; the majesty is within them. They are the Paris twilight in movement. They are the taxi as it voyages through the Place de Concorde. Not-quite-consummated desire and the lights and bistros and ambient people of Paris get transformed (by means of an extraordinary style) into a set-piece work of art. This rampant aestheticization comes alive not against but through Dick’s folly, and not to have experienced this moment would have been a wounding and terrible mistake.
Dick’s downfall, when it comes, has less to do with his ruined marriage than with his eventual inability to love. He is left with night and no signage, no Paris, no bistros. The denouement comes in Rome, where Dick and Rosemary meet and finally sleep with each other. It is “not a wild submergence of the soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been.” In Rome, Dick is flirting with emptiness instead of folly: “if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.” Leaving Rosemary behind, Dick goes out to drink and is utterly miserable: “there seemed nothing to do but to go back to the hotel and lie down with his black heart.” “A vast criminal irresponsibility” burning inside of him, he continues drinking, gets into fights, and demeans himself. Dick does not progress from folly to wisdom in Tender Is the Night. He loses his capacity for folly and acquires no wisdom in the process. To be bereft of folly is to be bereft of wisdom, something akin to emotional suicide. Nicole, by contrast, wills herself into becoming healthy. She initiates an affair with a French aviator and, having been too serious in the past, she claims the laurel wreath of folly. Dick is left to contend with his black heart entirely on his own.
Christian Gauss, Fitzgerald’s favorite literature professor at Princeton, once quipped that Fitzgerald resembled all three Karamazov brothers. He had an ascetic and spiritual side like Alyosha; he had a quizzical-philosophical-moral side like Ivan; and like Dmitri he was a hedonist. Fitzgerald may have contained multitudes, but whoever he was as a person, however riven or broken, he was not at all fractured or schizophrenic as a writer. His prose style synthesizes, it combines, it harmonizes, and on the printed page Fitzgerald could be — without cacophony — Alyosha, Ivan and Dmitri Karamazov. The harmony stems from the tonalities of his prose style, an impeccable harmony of the surface. This harmony is palpable and audible in Tender Is the Night, though it is a novel of depths. Precisely because the surface, the prose style, is so wondrously in harmony, the all-in-one Karamazov craziness of Fitzgerald the artist could be given free reign. In Tender Is the Night, chaos could be chaos and madness could be madness, and because of the laborious and uphill battle undertaken to find the right words, the right rhythms, the right images, and the right metaphors, neither chaos nor madness devolve into artistic bedlam. Fitzgerald applied a poet’s pen to the fabrication of a novel that must be twice as long as Gatsby, and a novel about people who themselves contain stubborn multitudes.
Fitzgerald, who would not have disputed that folly is folly, indecorous and potentially lethal, uncovers the dignity of folly in Tender Is the Night. This dignity is not pleasure, not the desire to be entertained, not an addiction to the clamor of empire. Folly often brings pain and can easily issue in indignity, as it does for Dick. Dick humiliates himself with Rosemary by giving in to her allure, forcing himself into the role of the desperate older man. Folly’s dignity is more subtle and less familiar: Erasmus spelled it out in detail. Folly can coincide with intoxicants — wine, poetry, heroism, love — wisdom being meted out only to God. Intoxicants consumed to excess are poisons, and (with the possible exception of love) they are also temporary in effect. So, too, are they bound up with the dignity of a life well lived, that preoccupation of philosophers. Folly’s dignity inclines toward wisdom, and at the pinnacle of wisdom stands the ideal of a life well lived. Ivan Karamazov, the philosopher, should have learned more from Dmitri, the hedonist, who himself has everything to learn. In search of dignity, Alyosha is too young — in The Brothers Karamazov, the first volume of an intended though never completed trilogy — to understand that dignity and folly can and should be paired.
In 1940, after Fitzgerald’s death, Zelda wrote a letter to Gerald and Sara Murphy, friends of the Fitzgerald’s, and to Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s literary agent, that captures the dignified dichotomy of folly-wisdom in her husband’s life and art. In it, she described grieving for “his devotion to those that he felt were contributing to the aesthetic and spiritual purposes of life — and for his generous and vibrant soul that never spared itself, and never found anything too much trouble save the fundamentals of life itself.” He never took control of the fundamentals. In his incapacity, in his folly, he did not spare himself, he spent himself, without ever pulling back from the folly of an error-filled life. The merciless fundamentals did him in, but not before he discovered the aesthetic and spiritual purposes of life, a discovery that added up to no organized set of propositions, no immortal dialogues on justice or the soul, no tractatus philosophicus, and no theories of any merit. The discovery of these purposes, present just beyond the literal meaning of his words and most searchingly just beyond the words that make up Tender Is the Night, was contained, as it might be in a novel by Flaubert, within the style. In its quicksilver instability, this style wears the noble mask of wisdom, wearing it graciously and sincerely. Beneath the mask is the face of folly, which can approach and approximate wisdom. When it does, folly is wisdom with a human face and a human heart.
