Conspiracy
I found
out
from
confidential
sources
that the writers in heaven
in
secret
change their
written
books
and at
night
lay them
on
library
shelves
instead
of the old
versions...
new
generation
readers
do not know
originals
the old
ones
do not
read for
the second
time...
I read
fitzgerald
and
realized that
nights are no longer
mild
and that
dick
diver
did’t
marry
nicole ...
--tr. Danijela Trajković
Saint Jean Cap-Ferrat -- Marc Chagall
F. Scott Fitzgerald's final completed novel was "Tender Is the Night," published in 1934. He regarded it as his greatest work, but it was not well received by the public. His friend Ernest Hemingway later said that it "gets better and better," and it has come to be widely admired. Fitzgerald began the book right after "The Great Gatsby" was published in 1925 and worked on it for the next year but became dissatisfied with it. In 1927 he went to Hollywood to try to write for the movie industry but never had much success there. In 1929 he resumed worked on the novel but could only complete 2 chapters. Living in Towson, Maryland, in 1932, after the death of his father and the institutionalization of his wife, he finally decided on a theme for the novel -- a man of almost limitless potential (Dick Diver) marries a beautiful, mentally ill woman (Nicole) and sinks into despair and alcoholism when the marriage fails. Earlier titles ("World's Fair," "Our Type," "The Boy Who Killed His Mother") were abandoned in favor of an allusion to line 35 of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," a poem about his lapse into what he called "Negative Capability" ("that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts"). He salvaged most of his earlier drafts, changed the names of the characters, and recycled ideas, images, and phrases from various short stories he had written, as well as a great deal of autobiography. He finished it in 1933, and it was serialized in 4 installments in "Scribner's Magazine." He died of a heart attack in 1940, at 44, and in 1948 another friend, Malcolm Cowley, revised "Tender Is the Night" on the basis of Fitzerald's notes. Both versions are widely in print.
ReplyDelete