Sophisticates Abroad

TENDER Is THE NIGHT-- F. Scott Fitz-gerald--Scribner ($2.50).

For many a U. S. reader a nine-year period of suspense ended last week when F. Scott Fitzgerald, bad boy of U. S. letters, published his first novel since The Great Gatsby (1925). Somehow during those intervening years the news had leaked out that Author Fitzgerald had big ambitions, would not always be content to turn out facile potboilers for the commercial fiction magazines. Even highbrow critics admitted that The Great Gatsby had been a promising foreshadow of better books to come. Rumor spread that Author Fitzgerald was leading a double literary life, that he was writing a Dostoievskian novel in which a son kills his mother. Readers last week were relieved to discover that Tender Is the Night is built to no such outlandish specifications, but closed the book with still unsettled feelings about the author. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who started well this side of paradise, is not yet through purgatory. Though he often writes like an angel, he can still think like a parrot.

Tender Is the Night is a story of U. S. sophisticates abroad. Fitzgerald's are introduced as a little clique sunning themselves in agreeable idleness on an as-yet-unfashionable Riviera beach. To Rosemary, a naive cinemactress resting after her first success, they seem mysteriously charming. She is grateful to be taken into their closed circle, immediately falls in love with the head man, Dick Diver. But he seems to be perfectly happy with his beautiful wife, Nicole, and their two children. Other members of the set are Abe North, a musician who no longer works at it, his wife and Tommy Barban, half-French soldier of fortune. After a party at the Divers', Rosemary begins to realize there is something strange about Nicole and her relations with Dick. They all go up to Paris together where Dick falls in love with Rosemary. But before anything can happen Abe North involves them all in a drunken scandal, Nicole has a breakdown, and the Divers go back to the Riviera alone.

The story turns back several years. Nicole, daughter of a millionaire Chicago widower, is brought by her father to a Swiss clinic for mental cases. The doctor discovers that her insanity is the result of incest with her father. Dick, an ambitious specialist in psychiatry, is a friend of the doctor's, takes an interest in Nicole's case. In psychoanalyst patter, she "makes a transference" to Dick--i. e., falls in love with him. When her doctor advises Dick that he has done the patient all the good he can and should "break the transference" by going away, Dick marries her.

After Nicole's breakdown in Paris, Dick accepts an offer of a partnership in a Swiss clinic of his own. Nicole seems better but Dick cannot get Rosemary out of his head. Several years later he runs into her in Italy. They become lovers and quarrel. Dick goes back to the clinic, takes to drink, gradually goes to pot. His partner buys him out. Nicole, now completely cured, looks at her once-adored husband with new eyes, sees him rapidly losing his charm and his character. She takes the patient Tommy Barban as a lover, divorces Dick. He goes back to the U. S. and becomes a less & less respectable country doctor, in one small town after another.

Author Fitzgerald calls his story a ''romance.'' Its effect on the reader is painful. Unfriendly critics might damn it in words from its own pages: ". . . The absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration." But to the plain reader, his critical judgment softened by the glittering persuasiveness of Fitzgerald's writing. Tender Is the Night will be exciting in spite of its bitterness, moving in spite of its morbid sentiment. It will not be ranked as a great U. S. novel, and as a document of the post-War generation it has been anticipated by The Sun Also Rises. But it will not damp the expectations of Fitzgerald's admirers. Once again he has issued a promise that is more exciting than most of his contemporaries' achievements.

The Author. Princeton, which he left in 1917 to join the U. S. Army, still remembers Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and is not quite sure whether to be proud of him or not. Perennial undergraduate, projecting the roystering side of his bright college years into grown-up life, he has been the guiding spirit and principal actor in many an epic junket. He spent all of his freshman year at college writing a show for the Triangle Club, which was accepted, and then tutored in the subjects he had failed so that he could come back and act in it. In the Army he wrote his first novel, The Romantic Egotist, which was rejected. After trying his hand at advertising in Manhattan he went home to St. Paul, wrote his novel over again, called it This Side of Paradise. It was an immediate success. He became the accredited spokesman of the jazz generation, his book the bible of the ''flappers" and "snakes" of his day.

Though he rapidly became a commercially successful writer. Author Fitzgerald never entirely succumbed to the magazine school of fiction. His one play (The Vegetable) was ambitious but a flat failure; The Great Gatsby, first novel to be written about the rising phenomenon of the racketeer, was only a critical success. To support himself and his family he continued to turn out slickly-machined short stories, but between parties and potboilers he cultivated Literature. Never grim enough to be considered an expatriate, he has spent much of his time abroad. Among his good friends are Critic Edmund Wilson, the late Ring Lardner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton.

Stocky, alert, indefatigable. Author Fitzgerald lives at high speed, loves elaborate parlor games, night clubs, amateur psychoanalysis. He still looks younger than his age (37). Married, with one daughter, he lives at Rodgers Forge, Md.

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