Why Tender is the Night failed with critics - and readers

Read the Malcolm Cowley intro to the (fairly old) Modern Library edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" and you'll think the only reason this novel was poorly received by critics and readers, not nearly as popular, then or today, as The Great Gatsby, was because Fitzgerald made the wrong decision regarding chapter orders - he began with the scenes on the Riviera beach when Rosemary first encounters the Divers and their entourage and then later stepped back to the chapters explaining how Diver met Nicole, when she was teenage abuse victim and psychiatric patient, and married her (not his own patient, but almost). In the final edition, which Cowley edited from Fitzgerald's own notes and personal copy, the story is straight chronological. I don't know which way is better - probably the final version, as the novel is fairly difficult to follow and it helps to establish the two main character at the outset, the order of chapters is not the problem - it's the general, near total unsympathetic nature of these characters. Fitzgerald may have thought of them as the brightest and the wittiest, but to most English-language readers they seem to be selfish, cruel, egocentric creatures. By the end, Fitzgerald may establish some sympathy for Nicole, and he shows that she is the stronger character, that Dick Diver is weak and heading for self-destruction - but he totally fails in any effort to make Dick Diver a tragic hero. He's not - a tragic hero, in addition to eliciting terror and pity, is also brought to his ruin through a great struggle with forces outside of himself, with fate, with politics, with love, with great choices that prove to be ruinous. Dick makes no choices. He drinks himself to oblivion, wastes his life, and harms many along the way. Cowley suggests that Tender is the Night grows on readers, that it improves in the memory as it ages. We'll see. It's possible that it could also rot.