Tender Is the Night

April is the cruellest month, as we all know the poet speaks and oh, isn’t the poet right? But we also know that cruelty goes best with a touch of tenderness, as what would one be without the other? So we thought that the best choice for this week’s book is yet another (tender) classic by F.S. Fitzgerald, that cruel brilliant monster of a writer who forever changed the way we look at love and its glamorous misgivings.

“Tender Is the Night” is one of Fitzgerald’s mature works, written in a time when he was going through a difficult period, both financially and emotionally, as his wife’s health had already deteriorated at the time and with it the fragile balance of the couple. Thus, like other books he wrote, this too was inspired by their life together and by the issues that undermined the happiness of this flamboyant couple whose lifestyle caused the admiration and envy of their friends, fellow writers or artists, and of the society in general, who was keeping them under the scrutiny of its relentlessly vigilant eye.

What is so tender about this book? If we were to name just one of its magical ingredients, we would emphasize the atmosphere, vivid and filled with expectations as any intense spring or summer night, in which Fitzgerald’s characters exhibit their passions, dreams, doubts and neuroses, in style and with authentic nerve and elegance.

Let’s listen to the magic of a few of his tender sentences whispered on the page:

“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.”

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

“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. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.”

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

Convinced yet?

We will only add that the title of this novel was taken from Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale” and now we leave you to the pleasure of reading this little gem of a book, maybe during a (total) eclipse of the moon, or maybe on a starry night under the heavy sky, when everything becomes suddenly clear inside one’s mind and soul and when even the cruellest of the moral laws can find its clarity and purpose.