Tender Is the Night

“Even in their absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning, she felt a purpose, a working over something, a direction, an act of creation different from any she had known.”

When Rosemary first meets the Divers, she idealizes these two American expatriates as the greatest and most original of modern people. This quotation highlights Rosemary’s innocence as well as the idealism of a bygone generation, which has no more place in the void of post-World War I gloom. The “morning” of the quote is hopeful but will prove to be short-lived.

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”

Dick speaks this line to Rosemary after she has declared her love to him, and the meaning of the statement (the narration tells the reader) somewhat goes over Rosemary’s head. It is a dismissive way of responding to someone’s expressions of love, but more so it underhandedly comments about the oddity and fickleness of human relationships in general, observing how unlikely connections can illogically thwart the deep, ingrained ties of old connections.

“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this—so accidental—just when everything was going well.”

Later in the book, it will be implied that Luis Campion, the speaker of this line to Rosemary, is gay. Following that train of thought and given the intolerant time period in which he lives, it is no wonder Campion finds love to be an agonizing experience. However, this quote also highlights another aspect of love: its accidental nature, its poorly-timed randomness, and inscrutability with regard to the pain it causes, illustrate the novel’s thematic preoccupation with love as a form of conflict.

“Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

Dick speaks these words eulogizing the fallen soldiers at a World War I memorial site. His connection between war and love will demonstrate itself visibly later during a public shooting at a train station, as this violent scene is later determined to be a crime of passion. For Dick, love is another form of conflict, while conflict embodies something of the nature of love.

“She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart.”

Illustrating the novel’s themes of The Futility of Life and The Failure of the American Dream, this narrated comment about Rosemary’s naivety qualifies beauty as a felt, subjective phenomenon only, not something that exists externally. If splendor is something exclusively in the heart, then many of the novel’s characters’ struggles to find validation and fulfillment in external things is an enterprise doomed from the start.

“And I mean love. Active love—it’s more complicated than I can tell you.”

As Dick explains to Rosemary why he must remain loyal to Nicole, he uses the term “active love” to describe what he shares with Nicole. Though it is telling that he does not try to explain the term, it nevertheless implies a committed love based on actions over feelings. Dick will later waver in this “active love” for an (unsuccessful) attempt at more personally-fulfilling sentiments with Rosemary.

“Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?”

This is a very ironic sentence coming from Dick, the psychiatrist whose job it is to facilitate growth and change in people. He says it to Rosemary after inviting her to join him and Nicole and having his invitation declined because she promised Mary North to try and help her husband Abe, who is drunk, leave the party. Though it is unexpected coming from a psychiatrist, this quotation rings true later in the novel when people’s attitudes and decisions seem to be insurmountable obstacles, which no other person can do anything about.

“She laughed, Rosemary laughed too, but they were both horrified, and both of them deeply wanted Dick to make a moral comment on the matter and not leave it to them.”

After the incident of the public shooting at the train station, Rosemary and Nicole both look to Dick to explain away the situation and provide closure. Dick does not do so because he cannot—he is too distracted about the fallout of his affair with Rosemary. Viewed from a broader perspective, the novel’s main characters typically cannot make ultimate sense out of the strange circumstances they observe happening around them, and when they try to run to other individuals for clarity, those other individuals are just as lost and confused, too.

“The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.”

What inspires Abe to drink is a longing to escape into the past, which is emblematic of a nostalgia for an earlier time, both individually and globally. One of the messages of the novel, however, is that there is no going back after World War I.

“Oh, we’re such actors—you and I.”

Rosemary says this to Dick in the midst of one of their amorous meetings in Paris. Technically speaking, Rosemary is the actor and Dick is a psychiatrist, but here she is commenting about both of their ability, regardless of their talents and professional occupations, to slide into the behavior of posturing and performance.

“God, am I like the rest after all? Am I like the rest?”

The motto for Dick’s ambitions as a psychologist here finds expression in negative terms as an introspective judgment. Indicating that this question haunted him frequently, the narrative characterizes Dick during his early days in the field of psychology as a vain man stuck in the dream of his own idealist world, in which he is the center. Though it is noble to strive for greater things, Dick’s ambition ultimately separates him from loving others and experiencing their love in a meaningful way.

“The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical’—he has won his battle without a struggle.”

Dick shares his opinions about the psychiatric industry with Franz, claiming here that the biggest problem in practicing psychotherapy is the way in which people with less daunting struggles take advantage of it, only to come out the other side claiming hard-earned, self-inflating victory. There is no easy way to perform triage when the patients’ ailments reside within the abstract, cognitive domain. As this is Dick’s opinion, it informs the way he approaches his patients and treats Nicole.

“Her face, ivory and gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain, had a promise Dick had never seen before […] a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection of youth upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and the economy were there.”

One of the things Dick notices about Nicole when he is falling in love with her during the days of her stay in the Swiss hospital, is her “promise,” namely that she will endure well—physically, but also psychologically. Dick believes that marrying Nicole will amount to marrying a real “catch,” yet later in the novel his hopes are dashed when Nicole’s condition flares up again and drives a wedge in their relationship. The original promise of Nicole’s appearance sets Dick up for the loss of idealism characteristic of a key pattern recurring throughout the book.

“He was conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable country by German trained-bands.”

As Dick visits Germany, he notices with grim humor that the English tourists who have returned there four years after the end of the war now walk about with suspicion in their faces, as though the German people themselves are untrustworthy. This passage illustrates the ongoing tensions and lingering influence of World War I in the post-war world.

“Well, how can anyone tell what’s eccentric and what’s crazy?”

While discussing Nicole’s case, Beth (Baby) Warren says this to Dick, hoping he will tell her more about the current state of Nicole’s health. As a psychiatrist, Dick knows one’s mental wellness is not always so clear a thing, so he uses the word eccentric to summon up a more balanced description of Nicole’s state, but Baby thinks in clearly-delineated terms. Her question, though sarcastic in its delivery, raises a fair point about the predicament facing Dick concerning when to stop viewing his wife as a psychiatric patient.

“For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?”

This passage, with its naming of Dick as “Doctor Diver,” emphasizes Dick’s professional role as a psychiatrist and the inherently unequal power dynamic of his marriage to Nicole, the “mental patient.” The passage embodies the conflict that will be central even to their later marriage—the blurring of the lines between doctor and patient, and husband and wife.

“Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as ‘cruelty.’”

When Dick meets with Mrs. Speers, Rosemary’s mother, he notices the cool, confident poise that the woman exudes and feels briefly the same admiration that Rosemary feels toward her. When she says bluntly that she gave her daughter wholesale permission to go ahead in her romantic pursuit of Dick, he stops short of thinking this is “cruelty,” recognizing the strange way of the world that makes women especially vulnerable and therefore renders them more preoccupied with “survival.”

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

This is the narrator’s (or Fitzgerald’s) final analysis of Dick and Nicole’s relationship. It is probably the most direct interpretation of the Divers’ relational dynamic and a reason for why their marriage fails. It also may be a succinct thesis statement for the entire book: that healing is a word only used in medical textbooks, while individuals themselves—real people—never fully heal completely.

“We must all try to be good.”

This is Dick’s halfhearted reply to a psychiatric patient on the meaning of her suffering. Dismissive and insincere, the comment also blurs the issue, leaving words like “try” and “good” undefined. Dick later feels remorse for this scripted line but feels it is reflective of the speech pattern psychiatric practice too often promotes.

“But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.”

A description of the power of Nicole’s mental condition runs parallel with a description of the problem facing the world in the 20th century. Just as Nicole’s illness is complex and cannot be treated in just one way, so the progress of time and the changing political and social climate of the world renders the existential angst of each generation unique and uniquely elusive.

“Think how you love me. I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

Nicole speaks this to Dick in the early days of their relationship, and it appears in the narrative here as part of Dick’s reminiscing on his past with Nicole. Prophetic of both the changes time will bring and Dick’s eventual dwindling love for Nicole, this line transcends the futile plight of the novel’s characters and stands out as something powerful and impervious to simple interpretation.

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, ‘Let’s play.’”

This sentence is referring metaphorically to the act of falling in love. Compared to a gathering of two naïve children agreeing to play, the strangeness of adults coming together to exchange the most intimate sides of themselves and pledge their commitment and affections in promised long-lasting unity is poignant.

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.”

As Dick ruminates over the possibility that Rosemary has been with other men during the intervening years of their separation, he briefly entertains the thought articulated in this quote. The line betrays Dick’s lack of confidence in the world of his relationships. Unsure of just how much he is loved, he remains guarded and aloof, which explains many of his romantic difficulties detailed in the book.