As in the myth of Icarus, what we romanticize can undo us.
The first time I read it I was mystified by the place names. I got the gist — that the characters were visiting World War I battle sites. I’m referring to Chapter Thirteen in Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dick Diver, like Fitzgerald himself, never saw battle on the Western Front, yet he surveys the memorial sites with reverence. It’s just war and death, his friend Abe North countered in so many words. War that’s happened before and will happen again; and death that happens to all of us, eventually. No, Dick argued. This war was different. This one broke us in a different way because all the religion and the hope and the dream and the spirit of a generation, amid the precise “relation that existed between the classes,” was poured into this battle. The Battle of the Somme. The “mill hands and Old Etonians” blown up in the trenches together.
Why, it came down to a “love battle,” Dick said. A love battle “invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine.” Abe mocked him in reproof for handing over the battle to D.H. Lawrence. But Dick persisted: “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” And then he turned to Rosemary, imploring her to agree with him. How could she not agree? “You know everything,” she said. She was already in love with him — her steadiness beginning to crack.
The first time I read this chapter, I thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I thought, Abe, he’s got to be Hemingway, right? Not just because he drank, but because he knew so much about guns — knowledge exhibited in the duel two chapters before — and because he refused to romanticize war. There was a confident masculinity about him that felt like the poet who knew for whom the bell tolled. The way he hadn’t approved of the dueling business, but took charge of it so that the children wouldn’t screw it up. Alas, the consensus among those who have studied the novel seems to be that Abe was not inspired by Hemingway but rather by another writer of the Lost Generation called Ring Lardner.
I read the chapter again to see if I could understand it better. Far from romanticizing the war himself, Dick Diver was really saying that because it had been romanticized by an entire generation, the normal fracturing that war creates was so much the more devastating. Because the men went into the war believing they were defending civilization as they knew it — its poetry, its manners, its cultivated ease. What was shattered in the trenches was not merely flesh but illusion. There was a century’s worth of “middle-class love” that met its end here. Shattered by grenades. And the red-haired American girl the characters met at the end of the chapter could not even find her brother’s name among the masses. So many names, so many graves.
I feel that’s the analogy Fitzgerald meant to communicate: that war is horrific, but this war was more ruinous by the romance poured into it. The crime is surely worse when the perpetrators believe it’s noble.
Dick sees romance as the force that fractures what he is trying so carefully to build: the beautiful, safe life where Nicole, his wife, is steady and their guests are charmed. Chapter Thirteen makes clear that he already recognizes the pattern. He speaks of love in the language of detonation — of the “silver cord” that’s cut and the “golden bowl” that’s broken. He understands that romance destabilizes structure, yet he cannot imagine life without its voltage.
Earlier, Rosemary overhears him and Nicole at the peak of passion, Dick pressing to return to the hotel so they can release it — as if desire were something that must be discharged before it ruptures the atmosphere. Nicole, instead of rushing back, delays them with a shopping spree. It is a small but telling deferral. Is she already tired of the cycle — perfection, intensity, crack?
She loves him. That is clear. But love, in Dick’s vocabulary, carries consequences. And he must sense it by now, given how he wrestles with his attraction to Rosemary. If Chapter Thirteen foreshadows anything, it is not merely collapse but repetition. The plot is moving toward something explosive.
NOTE ON THE TEXT: All quotations here belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender is the Night. This is a continuation of my journey through his works and the understanding of fracture.
