By the time Tender Is the Night came out, in 1934, the era, the places, and the emotions that the book evoked seemed fairly remote to the Murphys. Dick Diver did not seem to have much to do with Gerald, and if Fitzgerald had drawn a great many details, conversations, and incidents from life, he had somehow managed to leave out most of the elements of the Murphys’ experience in Europe that mattered most to them: the excitement of the modern movement in Paris, the good friends, the sensuous joy of living at Cap d’Antibes. And yet, in a letter written from the depths of his grief in August, 1935, Gerald told Scott, “I know now what you said in Tender is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroy.” Baoth, the Murphys’ older son, a strapping and indefatigable boy who had scarcely been sick a day in his life, had caught measles that spring at the boarding school he was attending, and without warning it had developed into spinal meningitis, he died almost immediately, before Sara and Gerald could get there. “In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot, the children,” Gerald wrote to Scott. “How ugly and blasting it can be, and how idly ruthless.” A year and a half later, in January, 1937, the long fight to save Patrick’s young life ended in a hospital in Saranac Lake.
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