Fitzgerald begins his last, and possibly best, novel, Tender is the Night on the veneered shores of the Cote d'Azur, where we meet a prideful psychiatrist named Dick Diver, his exotic and lovely wife, Nicole, and a budding 18 year old actress named Rosemary Hoyt, currently touring around Europe with her mother after the grand success of her first major movie production.

What could be more refined and elegant than the mingling of a man of accomplished stature with two beautiful women and one of the bejeweled crowns of Europe? When considering that the time is after World War I and just before the rise of Hitler, that Nicole was a psychiatric patient of Dick’s in her late teens and Rosemary, at this point in her life, only comprehends the world at the level of its glamorized exterior, a lot more.

Dick Diver plays the penultimate insecure Alpha male who’s stature it seems is only built up for the purpose of others finding benefit from watching it collapse as a result of top heavy hubris. Nicole, who when initially met by Dick, was a traumatized young woman and largely living within a sanatorium. Such a helpless young thing, greatly in need of Dick Diver’s guiding hand. Only, when she finally grows into a fully integrated person, a new dawn sheds light on the sacrifice that was made from living under an embrace that, while compassionate, was limited to protection only, “It had been a hard lesson but she had learned it. Either you think– or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.” Not unlike Nazi Germany.

So while Nicole was constructing an identity separate from the traumas of her past, it would only be inevitable that Dick would find himself not only removed to irrelevancy, but also possibly realizing that to give love also means to be loved, which Nicole was incapable of doing because of her self-perception of helplessness. Hence, enter Rosemary. But while it is questionable if Dick ever learned that one can’t give love without equally receiving love, he still suffered the ramification for not doing so. Dick was smart enough to recognize that the much younger and inexperienced Rosemary was not available for a long lasting relationship, but was without insight for his subsequent move towards even unhealthier means for feeding his collapsed ego– hard drink, half-baked career aspirations, social contentiousness, and even blunt physical aggression.

In the end, while the reader watches Diver collapse further into male-impotence, the reader also witnesses the transformation of Nicole and Rosemary into two individuals that understand the importance of taking command of oneself in order to establish a healthy relation with the world and others. In contrast, Dick always wanted to command the world rather than himself, initially under the self delusion of altruism and later, through brute force.

While my tone in this post is a bit flip, Fitzgerald consistently maintains an empathetic relation with his characters. Dick Diver was tragically limited to the social trappings of the male ego. While you don’t feel sad for him, you do pity him. Send in the chorus. Conversely, Nicole could be seen as being at fault as well. At what point could she have stopped playing the helpless maiden and taken control of herself in order to put an end to the resentment against Dick? To give love rather than be an empty and porous receptacle for love? For Rosemary, well, she was fortunate to begin compounding some valuable life experience, as you will if you also read Tender is the Night.