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Illustrated portrait of Dick Diver

A character in Tender Is the Night

Dick Diver

The American psychiatrist at the centre of the book — the man whose attention turns a beach into a party, married to the patient whose family paid for him.

What they want

To be loved. Alone in Zurich he lists what he wants — to be good, to be kind, to be brave and wise — and then adds that he would like to be loved too, if he could fit it in.

The book

Cover of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the NightF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934

The Riviera at its most enchanted, and the marriage underneath it — nine years after Gatsby, the deeper, sadder masterpiece.

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At a glance

In the book
Doctor Richard Diver, American psychiatrist — Nicole's husband, father of Lanier and Topsy
Age on the Riviera
Thirty-four; twenty-six when he first reaches Zurich in the spring of 1917, and thirty-eight by the last movement
Home
Buffalo, New York — his father a clergyman, later retired
Trained at
New Haven, a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, a final year and his degree at Johns Hopkins, then Vienna in 1916
Claims descent from
A Governor of North Carolina, and Mad Anthony Wayne
Where he appears
Every movement — the beach at Gausse's, Paris, the Zurich of the flashback, the clinic on the Zugersee, Rome, and the last Riviera summer
The real person
Gerald Murphy and F. Scott Fitzgerald — a synthesis rather than a portrait. The hospitality and the invented beach are Murphy's; the marriage, the drinking and the sense of wasted talent are Fitzgerald's own. Bruccoli also finds traces of Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish and Charles MacArthur · Murphy 1888–1964; Fitzgerald 1896–1940 · Boston, Massachusetts; St. Paul, Minnesota

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Doctor Richard Diver is thirty-four in the Riviera summer, and the book introduces him on his knees. Before his guests arrive he is working a rake through the sand, pulling the stones out of the beach below Gausse's hotel on the French Riviera — the beach Nicole says he made out of a pebble pile. He is a clergyman's son from Buffalo who went to New Haven, took a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, returned for a final year at Johns Hopkins, and reached Vienna in 1916 in a hurry, on the theory that Freud might not survive the war. The pamphlets he wrote there in an unheated room became the book he published in Zurich in 1920.

What people notice is the charm, and the book is precise about what the charm costs. He greets every guest by name at the gate, absorbs whatever awkwardness the others generate, and sits at his own table with his arms full of the slack he has taken up from other people. He is also the husband in a marriage the summary states plainly: Nicole was his patient first, and the Warren money made the arrangement possible. The first movement withholds only how it began, and which of the two of them it is using up.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • The rakeHospitality here starts as manual labour. He works the stones out of the sand himself, early, so that the beach is perfect before anyone is awake to see him doing it.
  • The voiceReddish and weather-burned, with short hair, bright hard blue eyes, and a faint Irish melody running through his speech. What Rosemary hears in it is a promise that he will take care of her.
  • The partyHe runs a gathering by attention rather than performance. Guests arrive suspicious and preoccupied and give it up person by person, until they are only their best selves and the Divers' guests.
  • The black lace trunksHis one piece of showing-off is a joke at his own expense: he comes out of the beach tent in transparent black lace drawers, which on closer inspection are lined with flesh-coloured cloth.
  • Lucky DickThe nickname followed him from his last year at New Haven, and he says it to himself in an empty room, half boast and half warning. He decides that the price of being undamaged is being incomplete.
  • The workA Psychology for Psychiatrists, a little book whose pamphlets reached a fiftieth German edition. Volume I, on Classification, sold in a small subsidised edition; the materials for Volume II lie on two long tables at the Villa Diana, the house he and Nicole built above the sea, and he is uneasy about all of it.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

The decline is metered rather than staged. Drink stops being social; a screen test offered in front of his friends lands as an insult; Abe North is beaten to death in a New York speakeasy offstage; a night in Rome ends with Dick beaten in a police cell and . He gives up his share of the clinic, and the charm becomes visibly a performance he is operating rather than a thing he has. Nicole, recovering into her own hard Warren clarity, no longer needs the man the money bought, and leaves him for Tommy Barban.

The last page is one of the quietest endings in American fiction. He raises his right hand and blesses the beach he invented with a papal cross, then goes back to America and dwindles through smaller and smaller upstate New York towns — an office in Buffalo that fails, general practice in Batavia, then Lockport, where he bicycles a lot, is much admired by the ladies, and keeps a big stack of papers on his desk said to be an important treatise almost finished. A girl in a grocery store and a lawsuit end that. The last postmark is Hornell, and the book leaves him 'in one town or another'.

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