April 12, 1934 –
… Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony….
Charles Scribner and Sons published ‘s the fourth and final completed novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, on this date. The novel is basically a cheery story about insanity, alcoholism and glamorous lives which metamorphosed into wretched ones, it was influenced by the descent into madness of the author’s wife Zelda and the strain on their marriage. The book was completed in the fall of 1933 and serialized in four installments in Scribner’s Magazine before its publication.
Over the next several years, Fitzgerald would struggle to finish what would be his fifth and last novel (The Last Tycoon.) He died from a massive heart attack six years later in 1940, almost completely forgotten and he considered himself a failure. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Tender Is the Night 28th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century.
But what the hell do you care, you don’t read anyway.
The Haus of Dcaligari 