We were happy once and we were sure that belonging to each other was our reason to be alive. Anything that had happened in the past had been just a test. I felt her body nestled next to mine. Every time we danced and laughed, I would look at her smile. It felt like Christmas every day and every night I felt the cool breeze of summer
Those were the happiest days of my life. And while I wanted things to stay like this forever, life was sure to object.Perhaps I should have left her before it was too late. I wish I could ask her to forgive me, not for leaving, but for staying too long.
When I daydream about the great writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, this is what I believe crossed his mind when he finished what I consider to be his greatest work. Tender is the Night is his most complicated and experimental novel, a sort of autobiography that gives an account of his tumultuous and self-destructive journey through life, and also an apology letter to the love of his life: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.
When you part ways with the love of your life, you hope to find them again one day and recreate those days of perfection that you shared together, but you also regret your contradictory feelings, because deep inside, you know things will never be the same again. That’s the reason behind all that people that surrender to vices and wait for a lost love to come back one day. In a sense, Fitzgerald wanted to prove his love by writing this compelling novel.
Dick and Nicole Diver are the protagonists of Tender is the Night. They lead a privileged life, just like the rest of their friends, in southern France. Jazz nights full of alcohol, pretty women, and small-talk is the bread and butter of their life. They have fun with friends and they choose those who’ll be part of their elite social circle.With this wild lifestyle we cannot help but turn to the Fitzgeralds, who in their glory days, were the stars of the evening.
“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
Dick is a handsome psychiatrist. Through a series of flashbacks to his past, we learn that Nicole was his patient when he was younger. She is a woman who has suffered from abuse and had a tempestuous relationship with her father. Although Dick tries not to fall in love with her, he fails. Despite the many objections raised by Nicole’s sister, who claims that Dick is only interested in her money, they get married and take a gaudy lifestyle in France.
“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.”
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” This verse from the most famous poem by Pablo Neruda echoes Fitzgerald’s novel. We see how a devoted and loving couple ends up hurting each other terribly when they start to show their true colors. Their perfect days are short-lived. Soon their relationship gets more fractured than ever when a young actress intrudes into their lives due to the Divers’ own fault.
“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
Let’s not spoil Fitzgerald’s wonderful novel. Although it wasn’t that well received at the time, it did earn its place as one of the best works from this American writer; some critics even say that it is even better than The Great Gatsby. It proves that it doesn’t matter if a couple is truly in love, staying “together forever” can be something so difficult to achieve that sometimes you can’t stay by a person’s side, no matter how hard you try.
“People living alone get used to loneliness.”
Nicole’s fragility seems to drag Dick into alcoholism. As the story progresses, it also unveils one of the most despicable men you can find in literature. Not because of malice, but because he is only human, so any man can relate to him and his path to damnation.
Tender is the Night was published in 1935, and still continues to be a reading that can teach us a lot about true love and its existence, despite life’s obstacles.
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Sources:
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Translated by Andrea Valle Gracia
