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Episode 367: 'Tender Is the Night' by F. Scott Fitzgerald
00:35:38
John J. Miller is joined by Titus Techera of the American Cinema Foundation to discuss 'Tender Is the Night' by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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- [00:07]
John J. Miller
Hello and welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Titus Teixeira, executive director of the American Cinema Foundation. He joins us in the studio as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Titus, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:32]
Titus Teixeira
Thanks so much for having me here, John. I love lecturing at Hillsdale, love to see that people care so much about movies, literature, and especially the invitation to talk about what is one of my favorite 20th century novels here for it.
- [00:46]
John J. Miller
It's good to have you here, Titus. Why is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald a great book?
- [00:53]
Titus Teixeira
It's his best novel. First of all, the Great Gatsby is a lovely reading and you know, it's nice that it's always on high school curricula, but it is a significantly better novel, both as work of art and as a reflection on modern America, on America after the World War, when the world has discovered that Americans are the wealthiest, most confident people ever. And of course, on the theme of democracy, morality and beauty, glamour, America in Europe, somewhat like in Henry James novels, but for the new generation, for the 20th century.
- [01:28]
John J. Miller
We're going to talk about all of that. The story, the characters, the movie adaptation, what movies do that books cannot not do. Also, we'll discuss Titus's hot take that this book is better than the Great Gatsby. Let's just jump right into the first line of Tender Is the Night. The book begins this way. Quote, on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseille and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose colored hotel, unquote. And soon we meet a hotel guest. She is Rosemary Hoyt. Titus, who is she? What's she doing here?
- [02:05]
Titus Teixeira
It turns out she is an ingenue. She's very American, but also strangely innocent because she's been working all her life to lead up to this moment. She's now a star. She's just made her first picture, Daddy's Girl. This is an allusion to D.W. griffith, to Lillian Gish, to that kind of early silent cinema star. To some extent, the pictures were dominated by these beautiful, beautiful, very expressive women that sort of wrenched at your heart. And so she went into the canals of Venice for a shot that they really had to get that set up again in the get up until she got pneumonia and she's now recovering. Months later, on the French Riviera, even. And she's made it. She's successful. She's going to have a great career. Europe is at her feet. Hollywood is at her feet. She's gonna be a millionaire. But she's sort of found herself as a woman. She's just turning 18. And she's also finding herself as an American woman in the modern world. Now she has options, now she has success, now she's for love.
- [03:07]
John J. Miller
In short, the French Riviera is our setting, at least initially with this book. I've never been there. It's in the south of France. I associate it with glamour. You know, Monaco is there, and so on. Titus, what is the French Riviera, and why is this American novel set there?
- [03:26]
Titus Teixeira
This is, in a way, the invention of the French Riviera, and it is credited to Americans, the Anglo types, as from James Bond novels, for example. They go to spas in the north of France. It's sort of classiers. It's casinos. It's a more indoor scene, and the weather fits them better. But as protagonist Dick Diver says, well, lots of us Americans, we come from tropical weather. And as we have all learned subsequently, Americans really love the South. California to Florida, everything. Arizona, New Mexico. So it's a warmer place, but less civilized. On the French Riviera, it's beautiful, it's glamorous. It's sort of like California, but it's also, in a way, free of the convention. The northern spas are literally between London and Paris. The French Riviera is free. Mediterranean. You have all the luxuries of Mediterranean society going back to the Roman villas, but none of the moral constraints of Victorian society.
- [04:27]
John J. Miller
And what's going on in the world right now? Tender Is the Night was published in 1934. What's happening in Europe, in the world, when this novel is set?
- [04:37]
Titus Teixeira
So the novel is set right after World War I, and in the 20s, in a way, the entire civilization is being reshuffled. People have been through shocking things, and you begin to reassess. What did we have to do to get through it? What are our new options? And primarily for purposes of the novel, this means that Americans are now in charge. People are desperate, as we hear in the novel, in the Riviera, but also in Switzerland, for the Americans to come back. Only American money can keep European glamour going. This, you know, has turned out to be a very important theme in the subsequent century. But that was just the beginning of this transformation. And that also meant that Americans would have to now rethink some of their situation. We Get a very wealthy family from Chicago. Money made out of business that can now be spent by glamorous women on glamorous lifestyles. And so America is also changing from an industrial society to a society where people care a lot more about taste, sophistication. We hear, for example, early in the novel about going to Paris to spend money on all sorts of gadgets as well as all sorts of beautifications. These new products of industry are also luxuries, and they appeal to the higher class of women. And it allows Fitzgerald not just to describe all of these things, but also to describe the kinds of women like Rosemary, like Dick Diver's wife, Nicole, Mary and so forth.
- [06:07]
John J. Miller
Well, let's jump into that now, because we've met Rosemary Hoyt, this American actress, this newly glamorous American actress who is carousing in the French Riviera. She soon meets these two other really important key characters in Tender Is the Night. A married couple, husband and wife, Dick Diver and Nicole Diver. Who is Dick Diver?
- [06:31]
Titus Teixeira
Dick is something of a mystery. As a character, he is a very American man, but he, unlike most American men, has a love of learning, a need to distinguish himself scientifically in terms of enlightenment. So he becomes a doctor, but he's more interested in psychiatry. He leaves America for Central Europe to study with Dr. Freud before, you know, it's too late. After all, at that part of the story, we're still at the end of World War I, and he goes through the war without seeing any action. He's not a man of action. He is something else. He's interested in psychiatry. He's interested in succeeding in this new world on the terms set by the new world, in which a man has to distinguish himself by his superior knowledge and to retain a kind of daring as a man in this new situation, he would have to, so to speak, dive, as the name suggests, into the unconscious. But he is, of course, also a social climber. He comes from perhaps the lower part of the middle class, but he has taken the all American opportunity to make something of himself. You can, as an American, reinvent yourself, even as a Swiss psychiatrist, if that's your bag, as they say in the 70s. And so he has these remarkable options, but he feels an even stronger pull that sends him towards the Riviera as though inexorably like Gatsby. He discovers the pull of glamour and that there is a new possibility to become king, really. And that's what the story is about in that sense, sort of like Gatsby, who is a man in search of his kingdom and of his queen. In the element of the beautiful, you can fulfill all your fantasies. People can almost worship you. A man as attractive, as successful as knowing of human psychology can charm people, can offer them these parties, the experience of which is very like paradise.
- [08:32]
John J. Miller
His queen maybe is his wife, Nicole Diver. He meets her in an interesting way. What's their story?
- [08:41]
Titus Teixeira
So Nicole is the heiress of one of these Chicago fortunes. And she's also the has in her family on her mother's side, European blue blood star. And she grew up orphaned of her mother, grew up with her father, goes through something terrible that I guess will not spoil in the plot, and she goes mad. And so she ends up in the Swiss psychiatric hospital in which Dick eventually finds her and he goes off to war. And she falls in love with him and starts sending him letters. And it is in this epistolary, almost platonic way that you have an image of somebody in your head that you're falling in love with. It's just that they have had that moment of meeting and they saw that he's all so beautiful and that she's even more beautiful, that it's a little like, you know, your first encounter with say, stars or something like that. They look like they're more than human to each other.
- [09:41]
John J. Miller
She starts out as his patient and becomes his wife. Which sounds to me like a gigantic conflict of interest and a problem, obviously.
- [09:50]
Titus Teixeira
And I know this was a discussion among psychiatrists, there's a kind of joke, maybe apocryphal about such things. That among the early famous psychiatrists, Adler would believe that his patients love him, whereas Freud would say this is just transference. She doesn't love you, she just has daddy issues, as we would say.
- [10:07]
John J. Miller
She suffers from mental illness and this becomes an important part of the book. That's why she's a patient initially, but she's not cured of her mental illness. It goes on.
- [10:17]
Titus Teixeira
Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, this is the moment for the literary figures to discover Freud as opposed to say in the 50s when Woody Allen discovered Freud and I guess middle class society. But the point I'm trying to make is that Freud work is on the one hand in a clinic and on the other hand for the intelligent people to read the book. The Interpretation of Dreams, the Psychopathology of Ordinary Life. So it's not clear, are we doing science here? Is this exactly doctoring or is it something more literary, more maybe even spiritual? What is happening to people? And of course these are the kinds of debates that we're going to have Again, anytime now. Because just like psychoanalysis hasn't cured us, pharmacology isn't curing us either. And you have to somehow rediscover this question. Who are you as a human being? Why are you unhappy? What is driving you crazy? To what extent is that a biological problem? To what extent is it a spiritual problem?
- [11:12]
John J. Miller
So, on the French Riviera, this couple, Dick Diver and Nicole Diver, encounter Rosemary Hoyt. And now, Titus, we have our love triangle. What happens?
- [11:23]
Titus Teixeira
Exactly right. And of course, you know, you could say, look, it's a better love triangle from the point of view of a story if a woman has to choose between two men because it flatters women to have options, because men like chasing after women and winning against another man, and because it presents, if you will, civilizational options, like the man who Shot Liberty Valance. A lovely lady there has a choice of John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. The stars in Hollywood, the all American types. But here it's the other way around. As you're saying, it's the heiress of a fortune with all her sophistication, with all her sureness to. And on the other hand, this craziness. On the other hand, it's this girl who just comes from the thrifty middle class, working very, very hard, but who has arrived in the sunlit uplands. And that's part of Fitzgerald's suggestion that this is now a world run by women. He has a very important remark at some point when Nicole's sister, Baby, helps Dick out in a jam, that she spoke with the confidence, that broke the confidence of. He's talking about Prohibition. He was against it. Like the Gatsby novel. There's a lot of drinking in this novel. There's a lot of partying. There is none of that progressive, feminist, you know, progressive amendments to the Constitution attitude.
- [12:47]
John J. Miller
Dick Diver has what's, to me, a really interesting line. He speaks to Rosemary Early. Ish. In the book, he says this quote, new friends can often have a better time together than old friends, unquote. This is right after she says that she loves him. The lines provoke, provocative. It's even dangerous. But how do you read it, Titus?
- [13:08]
Titus Teixeira
Yeah. You know, Dick is in this odd position, which, again, has to do with Fizzer's strength as a novelist. He understands that women are, in a way, more interesting than men. And what's more interesting now is that they're in charge in a certain way. Nicole chose Dick, Rosemary chooses Dick. He's trying to defend himself a bit from the love of this girl. He's 30 or so, she's turning 18. But also he's flirting with the idea that you could make a new beginning. He encounters in the love of this young woman. The way she looks at him, the way she thinks. He's also perfect, like a living statue. The possibility that he can let go of all the suffering he's been through. Because on the one hand, he's on top of the universe. He's arrived in the rich class, he lives like a king, if not a God. On the other hand, of course, there is the secret that his wife is mad. And so it hits him in his heart. Does she love me or hate me? Did I do what was right or am I torturing her?
- [14:10]
John J. Miller
Rosemary tries to seduce Dick and initially she's unsuccessful. Later they will hook up. But how does this relationship develop? Because they don't just madly fall in love and jump into bed together. There's more to it than that.
- [14:26]
Titus Teixeira
Yeah, it's called romance. And in this case, of course, it has this almost tragic quality. It has funny moments because the woman is leading the dance. But she's also a modern woman in the sense that she had to go through schooling, she had to go through work, and this is the first time she sees a man that she might be interested in. And she's trying to practice female charms rather than professionalism. She has to make herself vulnerable in a way you don't on film. She has to decide, discover whether she's even lovable, as opposed to, of course, whether millions will worship at her feet, which in a way, in the cinemas they will, but it's this more personal aspect of things. She has absolutely no self knowledge. There is something ingenuous about her. She's incredibly outspoken, she's incredibly forward, but also incredibly soft. She's half woman, half mama's girl rather than her titular daddy's girl movie. And Dick responds to that because he feels here is somebody who. Who has not been frozen into a kind of selfishness of modern life, a kind of self obsession, what we'd call social media today. He sees this lady, she's about to be a star. When he sees her movie, he realizes how powerful she is. Coming across the screen, the world cannot resist her, but he himself for a while could resist her. Personally, man to woman, when you think about love, he has an awareness of what is involved, of what it means to give your heart away. That eventually she conquers him, so to speak, scares him into it. But for a while, he can look at her with this distance. As you were saying, you know, old Friends and new friends. He has a reflection on things, you know, he's uncommitted, he's considering his options. He's really thinking about the terms of surrender that will plunge him not just into the drama of the novel, but into this world, the rules of which are set by women.
- [16:37]
John J. Miller
How autobiographical is Tender Is the Night? Because here we have a male character who is married to a woman who suffers from mental illness and there are affairs. This sounds an awful lot like F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife.
- [16:55]
Titus Teixeira
Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact, more than any others of his writings, you get here a dramatization of the agony of his life. He had this very glamorous, very self assured wife, but she turned out to be crazy. And so you start out the lover and you end up the nurse. And it's a very shocking thing to go through, I think, for everybody. But what happens if your gift primarily is sensitivity, an awareness of emotion and its powers? His own gifts, that is to say, ended up torturing him. Everything you're so much more sensitive to is like raw nerves.
- [17:38]
John J. Miller
The title of the book is Tender as the Night. And when I hear that title, I think of the song by Jackson Browne, the soft rock classic by Jackson Browne. But obviously the book comes first and it's called Tender is the Night. What is that title mean?
- [17:55]
Titus Teixeira
It's a line in. In the middle of one of the stanzas in the middle of an ode by John Keats. It's a reference to the Romantics and to a peculiarly John Keats Keatsian tendency. What he's talking about in the Ode to the Nightingale is the way in which the experience of pleasure, delight, in this case in music and the mood of the forest, can make you surrender pain you. Overwhelm you and make you feel that you're almost dead. That is to say, you're surprised by such a pleasant experience into something approaching complete passivity. You experience yourself as half in love with death. And this passivity of the modern man, this romanticism of the modern protagonist, is what Fitzgerald felt in his own life, of course, in his talent as a writer and in his protagonists.
- [18:54]
John J. Miller
Now connect that idea with Dick Diver, this main character. You've already said his name is a bit of a giveaway. The guy's gonna take a dive. He does descend into alcoholism. This is not a heroic story for Dick Diver. Meanwhile, Rosemary Hoyt just rises.
- [19:14]
Titus Teixeira
Yeah, you get to see in the novel how these various characters end up, and that's Fitzroy's judgment on what kind of success there is available and where it tends to in 20th century America. Dick starts out looking like this, you know, the hero of a Bildungsroman coming of a story. You get to see his education. He becomes a scientist, enlightened. He becomes to work. He comes to work, he becomes an adult, a man in charge of his life. And you expect maybe great things of him. He comes up with some treatises, he's trying to do more. He's seen Europe, he's seen the ravages of. He has experiences that an American boy in the heartland would not have. And so you think, okay, he's going to do something with all that experience. But it turns out, in a way, the novel is not about him. It's like the protagonist of kids ode. He is a spectator to this great spectacle. You could call it the female American sublime. And so the Dick Diver turns out to be not that much of a man. He's a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient. But the patient is way more aggressive than he is. And that reveals that in a certain sense, a doctor or psychiatrist is a passive figure. He has to listen. He has to be overwhelmed in a certain way by somebody else's story, somebody else's trouble. And as he begins to realize that he is very attracted to the possibility of experiencing both sides of the world, active and passing, giving and receiving. But gradually he rebels against it.
- [20:45]
John J. Miller
Dick Diver starts out with the girl, his wife, Nicole. Then he gets the girl, the new one, Rosemary. Then he loses them both.
- [20:52]
Titus Teixeira
Yes, exactly right. That is, you could say his rebellion that he comes to a point where he feels that he is now just an actor in the inner lives of these women. He used to be the recipient of their confessions. Both of the women are very forward with him and have a confidence he lacks. But eventually he realizes he's just playing a part in their dramas. He is not the protagonist. He is not the protagonist of modernity either. It's them. And that's what he rebels against. And he retreats back into America and obscurity and some tawdry scandals. And you could say, you know, his star completely dims from that moment of Olympian serenity on the Riviera all the way back to America and the loss of all of his ambitions.
- [21:48]
John J. Miller
When Tender is the Night was published in 1934, met with mixed reviews. Some people loved it, a lot of people didn't. F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896, died in 1940. The reputation of this book has risen over time. It's not overtaken the Great Gatsby, published in 1925, almost a decade before Tender is the Night. But Titus, first tell us what's happened with the critical reputation of this book. It begins out kind of middling, and now it is really regarding. Started as great, yeah.
- [22:26]
Titus Teixeira
At the time, the people were very dissatisfied with the plot because they were not. They were not open to this kind of protagonist, to the artist, so to speak. The novelists taking over the inner life of a man of science, of a man of the future, and showing that inside he's really part of the times. He is driven by, not the driver of events. He's not really an authority. And this occasions many remarkable things. I mean, for Fitzgerald, Diver is an opportunity to talk about the characters of various English, French, German peoples. He reflects on Americans, he notices. He reflects on the World War. He has all of these sorts of passionate reflections on mankind, on civilization. And those are not the sorts of things that people were interested in. And after the mid century, however, after the failure of his career, his life, people first of all started re examining him. They sort of fell in love with this lovable drunk, with his suffering, with the plight of the artist in a democracy and so forth. And so they turned again to Tender Is the Night to look for the beauty. Look at his phrases, look at his paragraphs, dwell on these things and sort of find that sentiment of Tender is in the prose itself. And never mind so much, you know, the things I'm talking about. The plot, the issues, the characters, the drama.
- [23:57]
John J. Miller
And why do you prefer this book to the Great Gatsby? Because when we have a conversation about what is the great American novel, you hear Huck Finn, Moby Dick, something by Nathaniel Hawthorne. You sometimes hear the Great Gatsby. You don't hear Tender is the Night. Why do you think this book eclipses the one that has a stronger reputation that is assigned to children in high school and in college?
- [24:20]
Titus Teixeira
Yeah, you know, Gatsby is very well written. I think it speaks very much to a certain boyish idealism and moralism in America that, you know, some part of that is innocence. It's not bad. I don't think it's badly written either. I think it's quite impressive. And nevertheless, it does not have a view of what America is about and what it is going to undergo. Tender Is the Night creates every circumstance necessary, puts together plot, character, conflict, even the tone is all set up to allow at least some Americans who have the interest in literature, for example, to reveal themselves to themselves, to take sides and sympathies in various situations with various characters and discover that they are part of this drama. And then once they see which way it tends, where all of this goes. So you know the structure of the novel. There are flashbacks, there are changes of setting. You know, there's French Riviera, but there's Switzerland, there's an interlude in Italy. All of these things are oriented to give you an experience. It's not in sequence, but the sequence that counts is your experience discovering a kind of American destiny. America is now in the position where it gets to decide what democracy means, who the agent of democracy is, and what the character of the pursuit, because it has surpassed all the limits previous to the World War.
- [25:52]
John J. Miller
Let's turn to movies for a moment. Titus, you're a great critic of movies, a great interpreter of them. And of course, Tender as the Night has an actress as a character. Movies are a part of the story. Tenders the Night, the novel was made into a movie in 1962. It stars Jason Robards, who's maybe best known as Plan, playing Ben Bradlee and All the President's Men. I want to mention the movie, if only because Jason Robard's dad, Jason Robart Sr. Was born in Hillsdale in 1892. Little known fact, but what do you make of the movie version of Tender is the Night? Is it worth watching?
- [26:30]
Titus Teixeira
It's pretty fun to watch, actually. It's a 1962 movie, so it's right at the moment, say, between the generation of Hank Fonda and Jane and Peter Fonda. It still has a kind of interesting glamour. And it's long, two and a half hours. Kind of a loving look back at the glamour of the 20s, 30s, but also of the Hollywood of that time.
- [26:53]
John J. Miller
A lot of books become movies. What is the value of a movie as an art form? What can it do that a book cannot do?
- [27:01]
Titus Teixeira
Well, you know, the novel is primarily useful for two things. One of them is the interiority. It tells you what's inside somebody's head. Head. How a certain pattern of thinking emerges out of a situation. The way in which, that is to say, you surprise yourself, you see, oh, I'm thinking about this suddenly. Why did my mind turn in that direction? But the novelist can take that out of you, put it on a page and sort of explain, look what prompted it. Look how a man reacts to a certain situation. It's a quest for self knowledge. And on the other hand, the novel is also very useful for the grand sweep of things. You can tell people about an entire war, you can tell people about an entire society. Those things tend to go beyond the Power of cinema. Cinema is, on the other hand, so useful. And it was the art form of democracy, the dominant mode in the 20th century, because it restores to storytelling, to our need to understand our admirations and fears and conflicts. It restores to all of them the unity of action. Action. You have a completeness in one sitting, and you can tell you're undergoing one action in its completeness because of the emotional power of the images. They. They take you into a. A wave is on a wave, and then you move with it. And then eventually, of course, there's an end of the action. There's a culmination, there's a cresting and the breaking of the wave. And you are left to dwell on those emotions. As the lights come back on, the titles roll, and you think, wow, somehow I noticed something about what we all admire, because you're sharing it with everybody, says, now I get it. Now I see what we're all about.
- [28:42]
John J. Miller
Titus, you probably would have been a great professor of literature. We're seeing that in this conversation. But a good teacher of it, a good scholar of it. And yet, while you love literature, you have focused on movies and cinema. Why that choice?
- [28:57]
Titus Teixeira
Well, as you were saying earlier, it was a habit at. In the 20th century to talk about the great American novel, but it's kind of meaningless. There's no great American novel because there's never going to be a great American novelist. Melville's Moby Dick is probably the one. Huck Finn, also a contender. And beyond that, there's nothing that has this much power, this much pull, this much popularity. You know, either like, they're college novelists or Americans like Gone with the Wind. You know, it's to be Ben Hur, this is what they like, and Woody going to do. It's better to see and enjoy what they like than it is to try to force on them a great novelist. But cinema had all of that concentration of power. Americans recognize themselves much more readily on screen, to the point that we're living through now, that we kind of feel the past must have been in black and white. The American past is all on cinema, some of which, of course, filmed by cameras. And it can be glorious moments or can be things that shock the nation. Like there's video of Kennedy getting shot. Nobody knew what they would be seeing that day, but it has become indelible in the national memory. So the power of cinema, of recording, of showing you what America is going through as it is going through it, the power of gathering this entire continental nation into theaters, into movie screens, and into the sentiments of the audience. That power of concentration and simultaneity made Americans think that this is who we are, this is what we're doing, this is where we're going. We are all in it together. So that's why I'm interested in that.
- [30:29]
John J. Miller
You are the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation. What is the American Cinema Foundation? How can our listeners learn more about it?
- [30:37]
Titus Teixeira
Well, the ACF was founded in the early 90s by Republicans in Hollywood. Talent, people in production or who were working at AFI or otherwise involved in logistics, organization, support, and, of course, people with money trying to offer something of an alternative to liberalism that was becoming somewhat sterile and somewhat, unfortunately, hysterical. Especially later in the 2000s, of course. And so anything from involving ourselves in film festivals to organizing competitions for script writers to get new stories, better stories, stories more interested in the American drama, and give those scriptwriters the publicity, the paycheck to see them through it, the help to try and get that to screen or at least get them to the next stage of their career. But unfortunately, the prospects for conservatives in Hollywood were catastrophic. Most of my lifetime. Things might be improving if you're thinking about, say, you know, I just recently saw an ad about moving movies to Texas with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, and of course, Billy Bob Thornton is the backseat of the car as they're doing this pastiche of a famous scene from True Detective. So there are new opportunities. And it was part of the mission of the ACF to help teach people, to help create a taste, to design courses, to write, go lecture, to do hundreds of podcasts, to restore interest in the great American artists and to tell people it's now the moment that we can take over the culture, the national memory. It is ours. These people are gonna burn it down. We don't have to let them. We love this stuff. They don't care. Well, you know, it's ours now.
- [32:16]
John J. Miller
Let's return for a moment at least to Tender Is the Night, the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. How did you, as a reader, decide discover it?
- [32:24]
Titus Teixeira
Actually, I came at this from political philosophy. I'm a trained political scientist. This is what I do. I still teach, I organize conferences. I'm involved in the academic life. But it was in, I was reading, I guess, Harry Jaffa and Harry Newman, the sorts of professors of philosophy, politics, out at the Claremont Graduate School or the colleges. And in one of these essays, I noted, noticed the passage of Dick Diver, reflecting on the Great War, his understanding of how he calls it a love battle. He says that, you know, all the concentrated power, affections, way of life, everything that went into the ways of life of the European nations, that's what moved them into battle and sustained them through it. How could you put up with the suffering of the trenches? How could you put up with that horror? These people love their countries, and it animated them even onto this. And I thought, this is a remarkably insightful thing and not something you'd expect in a kind of frivolous novel about the French Riviera. And I began to think, what if there's so much more to Fitzgerald as a guy, you kind of look down on Gatsby and all of this silliness. But then I thought, you know, he understood, but he was a man of his time, of his countries, but he had a distance from these things that showed him, I think, the true perspective. And so now and then I return to some part of the novel to think again about his observations. And I no longer look down. I look up to him. I think, can I understand what he's really getting at? Do I understand the experience he's pointing you to see what the future will bring.
- [34:08]
John J. Miller
One final question. Why should our listeners put down their copies of the Great Gatsby and pick up Tender Is the Night and read it right now? What is the case for this book now in the 2000s?
- [34:19]
Titus Teixeira
Well, I think it's much more obvious now than it has ever been before that the humorous war of the sexes, which can never be won because everyone wants to fraternize with the enemy, is somehow actually becoming politicized, ideologized. There's a. I've lived half my adult life hearing about my toxic masculinity. And at first I was flattered, but eventually I started to think that maybe these people think all masculinity is toxic and I'm not that special, which I don't like that. But so also, of course, you know, there are problems with dating or marriage. There are all sorts of difficulties with men and women that finally force people to, so to speak, pull up short and look at each other. And this novel, better than any American novel of the 20th century, dramatizes exactly that and speaks to this new situation where men do feel like they are in the passive position.
- [35:10]
John J. Miller
Titus Teixeira, thanks for joining us and telling us all about Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- [35:15]
Titus Teixeira
Thanks so much for the invitation, John.
- [35:17]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You reach me through our website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is Eymiller. And last all special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week, the new episode of the Great Books podcast.