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any item beneath the Divers’ beach umbrella emanates density and stasis. Gausse’s beach is a commodity, but it is a commodity manufactured by Dick, during the early twenties, which might have been modelled on an orchid. Veblen would have understood the doctor’s tireless application of the rake (302); like any rare hybrid, Gausse’s sand denotes that key to ‘good breeding’, ‘a substantial and patent waste of time’. However, by 1928 the leisured devotions due to ‘a bright tan prayer rug of a beach’ (11) are no longer observed. The sand serves a different expenditure and signals an alternative form of wealth. When Dick and Nicole bought ‘sailor trunks and sweaters’ in Nice backstreets (302), they did not intend to create fashion. Paris couturiers copied the style: Fitzgerald does not need to tell us that
haute couture
pirated from
Vogue
or
Vanity Fair
became a market leader – the busy presence of an Associated Press photographer on the steps of Gausse’s hotel indicates that the new users are more interested in image and spectacle than in etiquette. With beach umbrellas and pneumatic rubber horses, those ‘new things’ purchased ‘from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the War’ (27), the Divers make their version of a Victorian resort and so manage temporarily to deny the very purpose of that wave of manufacture. They achieve ‘absolute immobility’ (27) on the sand, where the future health of their capital stipulates absolute mobility. The adroit instillation of cumulative nuance into necessarily transitory luxury items is an archaic trait that the Warrens cannot afford. Equine inflatables are not and should not be Jamesian porcelains. At the novel’s close Dick quits the beach that is no longer his kind of artifact. Nicole, for all her recognition that it now serves ‘the tastes of the tasteless’ (301), stays, presumably to be photographed by the Associated Press.
    Each Diver accessory is a potential meeting-point between the two forms of economic authority which I have allegorized in shorthand as accumulation and reproduction. The meaning of the sweater or the umbrella depends upon who is economic master. Mastery involves a conflict whose history constitutes the texture ofthe object. Fitzgerald has an eye for the detail that retains the tracery of this struggle; he registers the economic latencies which divide objects as an archaeology lying at the very surface of things. At first glance Gausse’s beach is easily consumable, but the image is fissured: as a ‘prayer rug’, it summons ceremonies whose form Veblen might have declared typical of leisure in the 1890s; as a tanning mat, it services the body beautiful – that curious site of narcissism and self-denigration that encourages tourists to replace their own bodies with commodity selves.
    What passes on the beach (30), like the beach itself, is a struggle between forms of power. One incident may be treated as typical: Dick emerges from the dressing tent in transparent black lace drawers,
pour épater la nouvelle bourgeoisie
. His impulse is territorially effective; McKisco (one of the untanned among the pebbles) asserts his gender and insults the gender of his companions, while the knowing joke affirms the unity of the Diver entourage by releasing ‘a nursery-like peace and good will’. In fairy stories frogs turn into princes at the drop of a kiss; Dick’s transformation is only slightly less spectacular. Fitzgerald marks its importance by insisting, ‘At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class.’ As with incest, so with homosexuality: sexual preference in
Tender is the Night
should be read within an economic context. Dick, the keeper of accumulation’s daughter, appears to reveal his own phallus (the drawers
seem
transparent) by performing the absence of that member