Word: tenderness
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Just before Tender Is the Night was published in 1934, Scott Fitzgerald mused to his friend Gerald Murphy, who served as one of the models for Dick Diver: "It has magic. It has magic." It was indeed a seductive book, and a nimbus of equally powerful magic surrounded its author. Though Scott squandered his talent and Zelda went mad, legend still holds firmly that they were enchanted people somehow removed from the dailiness of life...
...that the legend springs less from the frantic Fitzgeralds than from Gerald and Sara Murphy, the subjects of this immaculate essay. The first hundred pages of Tender Is the Night evoke a world nearly as lyrical as Keats' vision of embalmed darkness and sunburnt mirth, and it was a world palpably created by the Murphys. For nearly a decade, artists of all sorts enjoyed a respite from their messy lives in the company of Gerald and Sara. Picasso, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Cole Porter-all were drawn to the couple before the Fitzgeralds arrived in France...
...Villa America and cleared a stretch of beach called La Garoupe. Gerald painted huge, careful canvases that are fascinating precursors of Pop art. But both the Murphys were more interested in a life of quality and beauty than in art. "The Divers' day," as Fitzgerald translated it in Tender Is the Night, "was spaced like the day of older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand and give all the transitions their full value...
...waffle irons, portable bathhouses and inflatable rubber horses. Fitzgerald was so awed by Murphy's taste that he thought it must apply to everything and consulted him on literary matters. Gerald did not really respond to his friend's work. Indeed, it was only on rereading Tender Is the Night years later that he recognized that pages and pages of detail had been lifted intact from his life...
...deceptive thin strength of a whip antenna. Its basic hue is a Canarsie twang that suggests Judy Holliday negotiating The Party's Over. But hue is one thing and cry another, as proved by Carole's pile-driving thrust in a number called Smackwater Jack, or her tender, searching way with the line, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever gonna make it home again...