sentimentality

Last summer I explored a little old bookstore in Dinkytown. One of the books I ended up buying was Tender is the Night, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

When I think "F. Scott Fitzgerald," I think of the roaring twenties, alcohol, the Lost Generation, Zelda Sayre, poverty, glitz and glamour, Paris, The Great Gatsby--and good lord, does the man have a way with words.

Tender is the Night is full of Fitzgerald's characteristic intensity. Here are a couple of my favorite passages, just for fun.

In one of her letters, the young, recovering, and beautiful Nicole writes to Dick, "You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life to spring from it."

That's so beautiful. Even the rawest, most confusing, unreal, unpleasant parts of life, some of which you can only stumble through on your own, are entirely necessary to touch life, to understand it at its core; it's only then that you can truly conquer it. 

Or look at this. As Dick Diver's life began to deteriorate, he thinks back and remembers when 

"He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."

Over time I've gotten a bit more cynical, as do we all, I suppose.I look back on what I "used to think that I wanted to be" sometimes and I just laugh because all of it is so impossible.

Nonetheless, I imagine Fitzgerald being rather optimistic in his youth. He was immensely talented and people knew him. He married one of the most vibrant, creative women of the age.

However, Tender is the Night was his last completed novel, and he wrote it in one of the most difficult periods of his life.  The novel echoes several of the darker themes in Fitzgerald's own life as it explores the downfall of the talented, charismatic Dick Diver, a tragic marriage with the mentally ill Nicole, the coming of age of innocent Rosemary, alcoholism, destruction, affairs, an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.

Fitzgerald wrote it as his own wife was institutionalized and as she began a downward spiral into schizophrenia. A number of critics have painted the novel as a metaphor for his own personal circumstances. As Wikipedia (I know, I know, I'm sorry) states, "Ultimately, he poured everything he had into Tender--his feelings about his own wasted talent and (self-perceived) professional failure and stagnation; his feelings about his parents; about his marriage, and Zelda's illness, and psychiatry, about his affair with Lois Moran, and Zelda's with the French aviator Edouard Jazan."

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre and their entirely dysfunctional relationship has always fascinated me. Especially after reading Tender is the Night, I was asking myself, why did they stay together? Why did Zelda remain with an alcoholic, a man from whose shadow she could never fully escape, and why was Fitzgerald so drawn to the flighty, passionate Zelda, even after her breakdowns?

Although they didn't live together after Zelda's 1932 breakdown, they "still loved each other even though it was a love tinged with bitterness and regret" (Baker 2004). Fitzgerald explained in a letter to one of Zelda's doctors: "Liquor on my breath is sweet to her. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations."

In one of Fitzgerald's other novels (This Side of Paradise), one of the characters, Eleanor, tells Armory, "I thought so, Juan, I feared so--you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

And Armory replies, "I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

In that sense, I'm not really sure whether I'm sentimental or romantic. I guess it would depend entirely on one's degree of cynicism. Maybe the world hasn't hardened me enough yet, but I'd like to think that good things can last.

In a sense, Fitzgerald's relationship with Zelda could be seen as a failure. Zelda became an institutionalized schizophrenic and Fitzgerald was a certified alcoholic.

Furthermore, Tender is the Night certainly seems to emphasize the tragedy of "romance"--of that desperate confidence that things [won't] last." As Dick and Nicole's romance falls apart, Fitzgerald seems to recognize that the part of him that is still desperately in love with Zelda is falling apart too. Zelda was traveling ever further from him into the realms of mental illness. And although Nicole presents a stronger picture in the end, her very sanity still allows her to grow away from Dick by choice. In the process, both males--Dick and Fitzgerald--seem to have lost not only their wives, but also themselves. It's quite sad, really.

So why does such a doomed relationship from the 1920s have such a hold on me? Maybe it's because in a certain sense, even if they lost everything else that should constitute a healthy relationship, the way that Fitzgerald and Zelda felt about each other did last.

As he reflected back on their relationship, Fitzgerald once stated, "I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."

That's really something.

And it reeks of sentimentality.