In a spring 2013 graduate seminar on F. Scott Fitzgerald at Penn State, I conducted an experiment with Tender Is the Night. I had the seminar members read the novel as a serial text in an attempt to duplicate, as nearly as possible, the experience that readers of Scribner's Magazine might have had during the first four months of 1934, when the novel appeared there in installments. Our Special Collections Library at Penn State had purchased original issues of the magazine for January, February, March, and April of 1934—for my use in preparing the Cambridge University Press edition of the novel, published in the spring of 2012.1 It was a relatively simple matter to have the four installments scanned from the original issues and reproduced, by photocopy, for the seminar students. Of the ten members of the class, five had read Tender Is the Night before—Dave McConnell, Krista Quesenberty, Derek Lee, Jace Gatzmeyer, and Justin Mellette. The other five students—Joe Greenwell, Michael Maguire, Robert Birdwell, John Schneider, and Emmet Quinn—were innocent subjects, with no knowledge of how the novel would progress or end.I observed a few rules. I passed out the first installment at the first meeting of the class. Then I distributed the other installments, one by one, at two-week intervals. The students were not reading the serial text exactly as readers in 1934 would have, with four-week periods between sections. I had to improvise and use two-week breaks if we were to finish in one semester. Our method brought us as close as we could come to what the original readers of the serial might have experienced. The week after I had distributed an installment, we would discuss that section. I had to restrain myself from talking overly much about what was to come. Usually I managed, but not always. I told the students to keep a reading log, entering their assessments after finishing each section. And I admonished them not to read ahead in a copy of the full novel.As nearly everyone in the Fitzgerald field knows, the serial text of Tender Is the Night is quite different from the book text. It is my impression, however, that almost no one in Fitzgerald studies has actually read the serial text. That text is difficult to access. Only a few libraries now possess runs of the old magazine, and the images (still under copyright) have not yet been made available on the Internet. Fitzgerald continued to revise the installments of Tender Is the Night until almost the last moment before publication; at the same time, perhaps on the same days, he was working on the other sections for the book text.The Scribner's editors removed some sexual innuendo from the magazine text. The discussion with Francisco, the homosexual son of Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real in book 3, chapter 2, was truncated, and Dick's comment “I never did go in for making love to dry loins,” in book Three, Chapter XI, was cut (Tender 274–76, 346). Dick's decline is slower and is traced in greater detail, an effect that is intensified by the slower rhythm of reading, with intervals between the four sections. The pen-and-ink illustrations by Edward Shenton are present in the serial, however, even more of them than appeared in the first edition. The serial text is surrounded by advertisements and often shares space on the pages with writings by other authors. The second and third installments begin with long catch-up paragraphs, apparently written by one of the Scribner's editors, perhaps Maxwell Perkins. These paragraphs remind readers of what has come before in the novel. The biggest difference in reading Tender Is the Night as a serial is that one has time between each section to think about the characters and to wonder what will happen to them, what Fitzgerald has in store for them.It was common to read a novel as a serialized text in 1934, and had been since at least the mid-nineteenth century, but it was a new way for these twenty-first-century American students to read. They read attentively. I asked them at the end to write out their reactions to the serialized text. These follow in symposium form below. I thank these students for their willingness to participate in this experiment, and for setting down their thoughts for others in Fitzgerald studies to enjoy.—James L. W. West IIIBefore this experiment, I had never read Tender Is the Night, or a serialized novel, making this experience truly new. I awaited installments of Tender as I would episodes of a television show, wondering between episodes how the storylines would be resolved.The first installment was the most memorable. The technique used to introduce the characters on the French Riviera and the various cliffhangers set the tone structurally for the rest of the novel. Fitzgerald introduces his characters via Rosemary Hoyt. With her celebrity as bait, Rosemary walks along the beach collecting the occupants' physical features—“A bald man in a monocle, and a pair of tights,” and “a tanned pretty woman”—until the two groups of Americans recognize her as a movie star and introduce themselves (1: 2; 11). It took two careful readings to understand what was happening in this scene. While I appreciated the subtlety of the technique, I wondered if it might have evoked confusion or frustration in 1934 readers.Many questions remained at the end of the first installment. What will happen between the paternal Dick and the fatherless Rosemary? What did Mrs. McKisco see during the party? Why is Tommy so protective of Nicole? What causes the coolness that Rosemary perceives in the Divers' relationship? Will anything happen between Rosemary and Earl Brady? And why is Dick not currently practicing medicine? This installment demands time and attention, but in return it promises much for future sections.The initial scene of Tender became my flotation device when Nicole's illness and Dick's descent flooded the story. But Fitzgerald deflated my flotation device by revealing Nicole's inner thoughts: the Riviera paradise I had fashioned in my imagination was an illusion. Nicole's entry illuminates the strife beneath that beautiful beach scene. This move is brilliant, not only because it manipulates my idea of the first scene, but also because it defends the novel against my critique that Dick's descent is rushed. To see Dick deteriorate from a respected leader to a prisoner with an injured eye is jarring; however, Nicole's diary entry, as well as the flashback to Dick's past, reveals the depth of his issues. The question changes from why Dick descends so quickly to how does Dick hold himself together for so long.There are many other notable facets of the serialized version of Tender, but the narrative techniques and the temporal structure struck me most forcefully because they seemed uncharacteristic of Fitzgerald's previous work.—Joe GreenwellReading Tender Is the Night in serial form allows one to focus on the tonal shifts throughout the text. Rosemary's initial highly romanticized interpretation of the Divers and their entourage effectively leads readers to expect that the entire novel will be told from such a perspective (that of the partially involved narrator, as in The Great Gatsby). The foray into Dick's background in part 2 is a drastic shift, more so than in the published text, owing to the time lapse between installments. Though jarring, the gaps allow readers to re-enter the text through a new perspective in each installment. Though the narration remains in the third person, the focus on Dick allows for a more thorough fleshing-out of his character and dramatically alters the tone of the novel, from a whimsical portrait of expatriate life on the Riviera to a serious and foreboding meditation on mental disease.Reading Tender Is the Night in serialization forces one to reflect constantly on the reading process. The gaps between installments created a reading experience that I had not had before. This was challenging at times. Minor and peripheral characters (Abe North, the McKiscos) disappear and then reappear. In particular, Tommy Costello (Tommy Barban in the book version) is an ancillary character offstage for many pages of the serial, but he plays a vital role in the final installment of the novel. Though his desire for Nicole has long been made clear, his rash and brutal character seems an ill fit for the former mental patient.The most intriguing aspect of the reading process was my reaction to the ending. In spite of my having read the novel before, Dick's fall, which was spread out in my reading process over a matter of months rather than days, felt less precipitate. I spent a longer period of time invested in his character. The tragic finality was accentuated; having seen Dick struggle to recover his vanishing talents while remaining committed to his wife, I was left with little sense that his career, at the end, was only “biding its time” (4: 310; 352).—Justin MelletteReading Tender Is the Night as a serial enhanced my appreciation for the novel. The monthly installments slowed the narrative. This served two functions. First, I was able to appreciate Fitzgerald's lyrical language, which captures human emotions. Second, the four-month serialization provided me with a deeper understanding of Dick Diver's descent and the dissolution of his marriage. Dick's tragedy does not occur as precipitously as reading the novel in book form might suggest.Readers familiar with The Great Gatsby might believe that the Prophet of the Jazz Age was simply resurrecting old themes, particularly the impact of wealth on behavior. Although money is present throughout Tender Is the Night and indeed plays a role in the narrative, many of the issues Fitzgerald raises are timeless and universal. The psychological problems, interpersonal strife, and marital issues make Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald's most ambitious and courageous work.The first installment of the novel, which introduces Dick, Nicole, and Rosemary along with a dizzying array of secondary characters, did not capture my interest. Initially, Dick and Nicole are seen only through Rosemary's eyes. Her infatuation with Dick signals immediate disaster, but I did not see how Fitzgerald was going to generate enough suspense to sustain the novel. The complexity of the narrative was revealed in the second installment, in which Fitzgerald examines the inner thoughts of both Dick and Nicole. In the third installment, Fitzgerald explores the full pathology of the couple's marriage. The final installment shows Fitzgerald's facility with language and his understanding of human psychology.My initial concern that Dick's descent was going to be sudden was unfounded. Fitzgerald's characterization of Dick is one of the great strengths of the work. Written in limited omniscient voice, the final two installments give the reader access to Dick's inner world. The visceral exploration is startling in its complexity. Both Dick and Nicole Diver are believable and sympathetic characters.Aside from allowing the reader to adjust to the shifts in time and setting, the serialization also invited closer reading and deeper introspection. The issues that Fitzgerald explores in Tender Is the Night deserve this kind of attention. Child molestation, schizophrenia, divorce, and the lingering effects of war are chronic social problems. Many writers have explored these topics, but few have done so as painstakingly as Fitzgerald.—David J. McConnellThe Scribner's Magazine installments of Tender Is the Night keep pace at one-month intervals with current events—with history that the story elides. Tommy Costello (Tommy Barban) declares that he is leaving to fight a war. He guesses that there must be a war going on somewhere. Like Tommy, Tender Is the Night is oblivious to the contemporary events of 1934, staging the story almost ten years earlier, among a privileged group to whom the development of history makes no difference.The elision of history is consistent, however, with Fitzgerald's backward-looking realism. The illustrations of the serialized Tender Is the Night, by Edward Shenton, are at odds with literary realism. In contrast to the straightforward correspondence between story and image found in Shenton's illustrations for Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa, the illustrations for Fitzgerald are stylized and mostly symbolic. They draw undue attention to the most melodramatic aspects of the story. The lurid illustrations of the early part of the second installment—spectral caricatures of black men, a corpse clutching bedclothes, a woman with head in hands, a man murdered with a revolver—give way to an idyll of mountains and a gramophone resting amid foliage, to be broken again by pictures of a cannon blast, a figure with outstretched hands walking through a tunnel, and two persons walking in the rain. The decorations overemphasize the manic-depressive tendency of the story.The break between the second and third sections marks a reversal in the unfolding tale of Nicole's insanity. After the second installment, the reader is left with her fragmentary letters as the primary evidence of her illness. The third installment upsets that image of fragmentation through Nicole's consciousness. If Nicole appears mad, it is because her voice is reproduced in isolation. Even normal speech comes across as mad when the interlocutor is absent. Herein lies the importance of Nicole's obsession with translation—a grasping after context—even a foreign one. Metaphors repair reality as well; connecting hills with bellies is not the normal way to look at them, but these juxtapositions force a fragmented world together.After each part, one's conceptions of the characters harden. The revelations in each new installment disturb settled beliefs. Nicole is normal, incoherent, coherent, and cured: each installment is a shock.—Robert BirdwellIn reading Tender Is the Night for the first time in its original, serialized form, I was struck by the unpredictability within and especially between the installments. The shift in focus of the second section from Rosemary to the Divers is particularly jarring after having waited two weeks for the continuation of the story. The anticipated development of Rosemary's character gives way to a chain of ostensibly random, scandalous incidents. Early in the section, Edward Shenton's illustrations catch the eye. A few pages before Abe North's entanglement with a group of African Americans and an African Swede, the top-right corner is occupied by a drawing of several black, monkey-like faces haunting a distressed and implicitly drunken man. This uncomfortably racist illustration is followed on the next page by an image of a body laid out on a bed, with footsteps and a dagger framing the scene. The body initially appears to be entirely clothed in black; if examined closely the skin of the hand is black too. The dissociation between text and image is startling. Fitzgerald rarely writes black characters into his stories, and the foreshadowing by the second image of yet another murder is not signaled in the narrative. The grotesque and discordant illustrations ultimately reinforce the bigotry of Fitzgerald's representations of black characters as well as the increasing strangeness of the story.The transition between the second and third parts is smooth enough initially, but before the end of the first page, the narration is suddenly taken over by Nicole in a surprising and beautiful drift in and out of her consciousness, rendering the passage of time impressionistically. About halfway through the section, however, seemingly disconnected incidents stack up: Dick learns of Abe's death; shares an evanescent kiss with another man's mistress; loses his own father; and befriends a young man who nearly kills himself jumping off their ship. (The second and fourth of these scenes do not appear in the book text.) These events climax in Dick's beating and imprisonment, and we are left to find out if, in the final installment, he will recover from the new low (with two functioning eyeballs intact).It is not quite so surprising that the fourth part opens with Dr. Franz Gregorovius and his wife. The conclusion is rather poignant, yet represented with apathetic restraint: we are assured only that Dick is still getting by, somewhere or other in northeastern America. For such a capricious novel, especially when read in serial form, this ending is at first unfulfilling. Over time, however, closing in a minor key reveals itself as authentic to Dick's emotional bankruptcy.—Michael MaguireWhen I first read Tender Is the Night several years ago, I did not like it. The novel was depressing and uneven. Approaching it in the original Scribner's Magazine installments, however, proved a different phenomenological experience with an enhanced narrative structure and superior characterization. The result was a story that cohered far better in serial form than the same work I had once read as a book and dismissed.The key change of the periodical reading was the separation—and articulation—of the story into four narrative “movements” that were obscured while reading the book. Part 1 established the romantic ideal of the Divers' life, while part 2 planted the seeds of its destruction. Part 3 traced the beginning of Dick's descent, and part 4 underscored the death of his vitality and of romantic idealism in general. The abrupt shifts in location and time that initially marred the novel felt organic in the installments because the story started anew with each succeeding issue. Tender Is the Night pursued its own logic as a serial text.The spatial and temporal distance between installments improved the overall reading experience. Several unresolved incidents in the novel, such as the murder in Rosemary Hoyt's hotel room and the shooting at the Gare St. Lazare, were easily forgotten in the hiatus between issues. Likewise, the infamous point-of-view shifts between Rosemary and Dick faded over the extended reading period. For me, the elongated chronology of the reading experience actually tightened the internal chronology of the novel.I found myself speculating about characters between installments. What went through Mrs. McKisco's head in the aftermath of part 1? What power did Baby Warren wield over Dick after part 3? Fitzgerald's characters continued to live and breathe between issues, and their absences often enriched their personalities. Dick in particular blossomed in my imagination. Where he was once merely pitiable, he grew in stature with every installment as an increasingly noble and tragic hero. By the end, I saw him as nothing less than a Christ figure sacrificing himself for the sins of the world.If there were one drawback to the serial text, it would be the relentless gloom of part 4. Dick's collapse was even more harrowing to read the second time around. It was depressing not to be able to flip back to the beginning and see him again in the full splendor of those halcyon first pages.—Derek LeeThe jump from Book One to Book Two in all standard texts of Tender Is the Night is only one of several narrative disruptions, but it is certainly the most significant. The abrupt shift in Dick's character is jarring, and the conspicuous disappearance of Rosemary registers as the loss of not a peripheral character but a rich, interesting Fitzgerald heroine. In the four periodical installments of Tender Is the Night, however, the disruptive effect of Dick's flashback is reduced, while Fitzgerald's character continuities and narrative repetitions accumulate. Rosemary as parallel to Nicole, Dick's reversal of Nicole's narrative arc, Dick's frequent attention to ingénues, the multiple train scenes and shots fired—all echo across the narrative, turning Dick's fixed and predictable descent (in the book) into a series of nonlinear implications with greater payoffs (in the periodical).Read this way, the Rosemary seduction plot, as one example, provides more than scandalous tension. It also lays the foundation of Dick's emotional pattern of resistance-surrender-sacrifice-disappointment. The stakes are higher when Dick repeats the pattern, retrospectively, with Nicole, even as the temptation to blame Nicole (or Rosemary) for his demise lessens. Indeed, Dick's responsibility for his own downfall becomes the heart of the story.Along with headings, subheadings, and images that introduce each installment, the short editorial summaries further stabilize the narrative arcs and prepare readers to make connections among installments—bridging gaps the book text leaves yawning. The second installment summary announces that Dick and Nicole are “the principal characters of the novel,” prematurely resolving a narrative shift that easily confounds readers of the book text (2: 88). The same summary reminds readers that Nicole is “rather a mess,” though that detail falls out of the summary for the third installment, which focuses less on Nicole's mental condition than on Dick's. These summaries demonstrate that the Scribner's Magazine editors might have understood F. Scott Fitzgerald's work better than he did (and certainly better than Malcolm Cowley would). Though the three-part arrangement of the book text reasonably divides the narrative in terms of point of view and temporality, it fails to highlight Fitzgerald's effective character building through reverberations, repetitions, and reversals. The novel simply hangs together better when divided episodically into four parts, rather than logically into three. Fitzgerald's elegant, complex narrative structure is more accessible in Scribner's Magazine, and the final recognition of Dick's despair is more poignant.—Krista QuesenberryReading Tender Is the Night in serialized form has significantly altered my understanding of the structure and development of the novel. The structure of the narrative fits a four-part reading quite well. In fact, the serial version is precisely what brought this structure to my attention. The structure of the story seemed much more deliberate and coherently progressive with this four-part structure imposed on my reading. The initial section acts as a coherent first section of four, and the “What happened to Rosemary?” effect is greatly lessened by introducing a forced break between the first and second sections.Being compelled to wait two weeks between each episode has greatly improved my opinion of the structure of the novel, and of its narrative pacing. Reading with two-week gaps between the episodes had at least two positive outcomes. First, it gave better pace to Dick's fall, which seems less precipitous in the serial. Critics have commented on the abrupt nature of Dick's breakdown, some seeing this abruptness as a flaw in the book. In serialization, however, the time spent between readings allowed me subconsciously to live in Dick's world for longer periods, drawing out the anticipation of his destruction and easing its abruptness. After reading each installment, I was forced to wait, living with Dick's story on the outskirts of my consciousness, imagining the events of the next installment. By slowing down the pace of the actual reading and creating anticipation for the next segment, serialization allowed me more time with Dick, more time to predict the consequences of his decisions. Second, reading the novel as a serial reduced greatly the frustration with unresolved plot lines, such as the shooting in the train station. Being forced to delay the reading of the next episode allowed me time to forget several plot lines that Fitzgerald never develops.However, one forgets peripheral characters between readings. Tommy Costello in the serial version (Barban in the book) feels wrenched by Fitzgerald suddenly back into the story and given a major role. In the novel his role is perhaps predictable and is certainly much less strident.—Jace GatzmeyerEncountering Tender Is the Night for the first time in serial form is an experience best represented by the novel's opening moments. The reader is presented with the gorgeous landscape of the French Riviera, populated with people who appear and disappear (the man in the blue bathrobe who comes down to inspect the empty beach) until the beach is filled with individuals of different types and backgrounds. Fitzgerald opens the novel in a crowd, allowing characters to filter in and often describing appearances before providing names. Tender Is the Night unfolds in a way that not only takes its time in centering itself around Dick Diver, but also continuously concerns itself with seemingly arbitrary incidents and minor characters—events as disparate as the shooting in the train station (present in both versions) and the man who jumps overboard on Dick's passage across the Atlantic (only occurring in the serial). This discursive preoccupation, along with the narrative's distinct temporal shifts, takes on a heightened effect in the serial: history and experience accumulate around Dr. Diver, who cannot entirely disentangle himself from the accretion of people and events that cling to him.Tender Is the Night, as Fitzgerald knew, is concerned with the behavior, actions, and thoughts of a group of people, a distinct social community founded on the expatriate extravagances of wealth. Beginning with Rosemary's perspective makes the reader think about how this community comes together. Even as Rosemary disappears during the course of the novel, her youthful solipsism, and the way she comes to rely on Dick for experience, establishes an important pattern, reinforced by the way Dick Diver establishes a network of mutual need—with himself at the center.In serial form, the time shifts are mimetically recreated in the experience of reading the narrative in sections spaced two weeks apart. The reader ages with the Divers. Dick's slow unraveling is something glimpsed in pieces that assemble themselves slowly into an image of a man who has lost control of the community he once held together. Nicole especially moves away from Dick's guiding hand. Fitzgerald is exploring the limits of romantic love and parental nurture, revealing, as Nicole herself concludes, that “no one nature can extend entirely inside another” (4: 299; 314). Reading the novel in its serialized form allows the narrative some breathing space.—John SchneiderFor this project, owing to a visual disability, I listened to a recording of Tender Is the Night in the same serialized segments as the rest of the seminar. Without the visual cues of white space or the ability easily to review a heading or an earlier section, audio versions of nonlinear novels like this one can become challenging. The four-part serial of Tender breaks roughly at the major time shifts in the narrative. This allows the reader to process the sections as discrete units and experience a personal time shift while waiting for the next installment. There is time to process the shift from Rosemary's romantic view of the Divers to Dick and Nicole's meeting during the war. Indeed this feels more natural with the enforced wait of serialization. By the time the third installment arrived, I expected another shift through time and empathized more fully with Dick's decay.Fitzgerald's lyricism and long sentence structure make his prose demanding to listen to. He demands attention without giving immediate satisfaction, particularly when the reader is actually a listener who is unable to skim forward. It is a kind of practiced surrender, which forces the reader to experience the beauty of every word, slowly, in time and space.Listening to a book read at a normal pace, rather than mechanically sped up to several times the normal pace (as I do for most of my graduate-school reading), requires a secondary activity for focus. The hands and the eyes need to be busy so that the mind does not wander. During the eleven hours and thirty-two minutes of Tender, I seeded lettuces, onions, and brassicas in the greenhouse; prepared many dinners; and went for walks around my home on the side of Mount Nittany. This infuses the activity and place with the story. Upstate New York will always be infused with the gripping post-apocalyptic novel that my partner and I listened to as we drove our U-Haul to central Pennsylvania for graduate school. Some of those activities, like cooking, that I do regularly while listening to a book lose their unique association, but the less habitual activities retain them. Yesterday, while seeding a second batch of lettuces and onions, this time in silence, I could not help but recall Nicole's letters to Nick. The manic reaching and self-negation have become inextricably tied in my mind to the feel of glossy, black, irregularly shaped onion seeds and the smooth, flaxen bullets of lettuce seed.—Emmet Quinn