-- By Tom Phillips
This is an edited version of my essay published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol 19, 2021, pp. 189-202.
Syncopation
is the basic strategy of jazz—the displacement of emphasis away from classical
or expected patterns. A jazz piece “swings” not on the first beat of the
measure, the downbeat, but the second, the offbeat. In baseball, it was Satchel Paige’s
“hesitation pitch,” an indeterminate pause in the windup followed by a whipping
fastball over the plate. In boxing, it was Muhammad Ali’s timed dance break,
the “Ali shuffle,” followed by a sneak right hand.
Syncopation as style comes out of the African experience in America—the visceral need to hide, to keep thoughts and intentions secret, to keep one’s keepers off balance, to protest without seeming to protest, to escape under cover. Jazz is an African-American invention. Its forerunners, blues and gospel, were born not in Africa but in the Deep South, where slaves picked up the forms and instruments of Western music, and the essentials of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic culture: the English language, the Christian religion and its music, and the tradition of ballad-singing. All these they quickly adapted to their own purposes.
Whites
in turn were fascinated by the music of the slaves—their off-beat rhythms, open-ended
improvisatory forms, and sliding scales. A guitar is a fretted instrument, with
fixed notes, but Black musicians modified it, bending the strings to produce
“blue notes,” or using improvised tools like bottlenecks to slide over the
fingerboard. With the percussion instrument of the piano,
they reversed the standard rhythm—stressing the back beat, in “ragged time,”
i.e. ragtime.
Whites
turned all this to their purposes, both artistic and commercial. In 1916, Broadway’s leading composer Irving
Berlin declared “syncopation is the soul of every American.” By the 1920s, it was ingrained in American art,
in literature as well as music. Harlem poet Langston Hughes combined the cadence of the blues with the form
of lyric poetry. And syncopation was
also adopted as style by white classicists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and his contemporary,
the classically trained jazz composer Bix Beiderbecke.
In
the same way a jazz band can take a sentimental pop song and transform it into
something rich and strange, in The Great
Gatsby Fitzgerald takes a sentimental love story and weaves it into an
epochal drama, a fleeting history of what he called “The Jazz Age.” Daisy’s “low,
thrilling” voice holds the reader on the romantic theme, while in the background,
off the beat, Fitzgerald constructs and deconstructs a jazz history of the world,
i.e. the New World: America.
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Jordan Baker is a master of this kind of deceptive rhythm, of disappearing in plain view. “I
like large parties,” she tells Nick at Gatsby’s. “They’re so intimate. At small
parties there isn’t any privacy.” Later she advises him: “it’s a great
advantage not to drink among hard drinking people. You can … time any little
irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind they don’t see or
care.” Maggie Froehlich identified Jordan
Baker as a homosexual passer in 2010. But
Jordan has another secret, even more deeply syncopated in the text.
She
passed for white until 2018, thanks to a diffuse description of her coloring
that kept readers in the dark. Her skin is described repeatedly as brown, tan,
or golden – but the word most often used for her face is “wan.” It might seem
contradictory to describe skin as both brown and wan, but this is the
complexion of many light-skinned African Americans, known as “high yaller” in
Harlem slang. These contrasting color
terms, however, are never used in the same passage, but widely separated—syncopated
so the reader does not perceive the contrast. The text must be literally
deconstructed and re-assembled to reveal that under her powder and autumn-leaf (dyed)
blond hair, Jordan is a light-skinned African American, passing for white. Only
then do certain textual riffs emerge, such as the prelude to Nick and Jordan’s
first kiss.
Riding
in a horse cab as dusk turns to dark, they pass under a bridge in Central Park and
Nick puts his arm around Jordan’s “golden shoulder.” Jordan tells him he must invite Daisy to tea.
Immediately they pass “a barrier of dark trees, and then the façade of Fifty-ninth
Street, a block of delicate pale light…” A barrier of darkness, a façade of
pale light, evening shade, the color of tea—this is Jordan, this is jazz. It’s like the wispy filigree of a drummer’s
brush, in the background of a romantic song—working against the beat,
improvising a polyrhythm, as if the musician were thinking of a different
tune.
Nearly
a century after the novel’s setting in 1922, Nick and Jordan’s deceptions are easier
to detect, as binary categories of race and sex break down in America. Readers today
are used to the idea of a couple with individual sex lives that cross
traditional boundaries. Racial lines are fading as well, and people’s skin
color is being seen—veridically—as neither black nor white, but everything and
anything in between. This latter realization
points to The Great Gatsby’s, and
America’s, family secret.
________________________________
A jazz history is by its
nature an African-American history, beginning in the South where Daisy and
Jordan spent their “beautiful white girlhood” together (24). The irony of that
phrase hints at the family secret of the novel, the deep secret of the South:
Daisy and Jordan are not just childhood friends, but sisters under the skin.
They
first appear on a “warm windy evening” in 1922 that evokes a Southern idyll. Nick goes to visit his cousin Daisy in East Egg,
and beholds two women in white dresses, perched on an enormous couch, like twin
statues on a pedestal— except that like so many objects in Gatsby, the couch appears to be floating in the air. When it
eventually settles, Daisy stutters to life to say she is “p-paralyzed with
happiness.” Nick is mesmerized by Daisy’s voice—its “singing compulsion,” its
whispered “Listen.” Her stutter is the first of many syncopations—represented
by dashes—in the dialogue that follows.
Jordan
is a guest at the Buchanan estate, but clearly an intimate of Daisy’s. They act
like sisters, walking in tandem, talking at once with the “bantering
inconsequence” of improvised jazz. Jordan knows about Daisy’s husband Tom’s
affair with “some woman in New York,” and strains to eavesdrop when the mistress
telephones during dinner. Later Daisy sets about making a match for Nick and
Jordan—a joke, but one that immediately interests the two young singles.
Daisy’s
husband Tom wants to talk about the serious issue of the day—the supposed rise
of the “colored” races, and the evils of immigration from anywhere but Nordic northern
Europe. Daisy apparently thinks this is funny and annoys Tom with a reference
to the “beautiful white girlhood” she and Jordan spent together in Louisville.
Tom takes this as a reference to something Daisy told Nick, but Nick says,
honestly, that he heard nothing.
Jordan
stays out of the discussion, keeping her voice “murmurous and uninflected” as
she reads to Tom from the Saturday Evening Post, then the nation’s
leading advocate for keeping America white. In the summer of 1922, just about the time of
this fictional visit, the Post was railing editorially against “aliens
and hyphenates” and calling for Congress “to protect our own people” (SEP, 24
Jun 1922).
_____________________________________
Not
until chapter seven does Fitzgerald suggest the true relationship between Daisy
and Jordan, while simultaneously disguising it in the mouth of a babe. Gatsby and Nick have come to call on a
“broiling” summer day, with Gatsby and Daisy’s affair in full bloom and the
Buchanans’ marriage on the rocks. The
ladies greet them from the same enormous couch as in chapter one, dressed in
white like “silver idols.”
White
clothes and powder float through this excruciatingly tense scene, barely covering
up colors and feelings. “Jordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan,
rested for a moment in mine,” says Nick.
Daisy laughs at Gatsby and a “tiny gust of powder” rises from her
bosom. She sends Tom out for drinks,
then brazenly kisses Gatsby, murmuring, “You know I love you.” Jordan scolds her:
“You
forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.
Daisy
looked around doubtfully.
“You
kiss Nick too.”
“What
a low, vulgar girl!”
“I
don’t care!” cried Daisy and began to clog
on the brick fireplace.” (Italics mine)
While
defying convention and advertising her adultery, Daisy breaks into a
foot-stomping Kentucky folk dance, one practiced by both blacks and whites. In this brief passage Fitzgerald flashes a
mirror on the “white girlhood ” of these two, a mirror in which their roles are
reversed. Each is drawn to the other’s
image: Jordan to the wealth and white privilege of the Southern gentry, Daisy down
to earth, where slaves and poor whites improvised the art of clogging—foot
music, proto-jazz. When Jordan calls Daisy a “low, vulgar girl” the reversal is
complete.
In
this scene Fitzgerald connects race and illicit sex with Southern folkways, a
connection crucial to understanding what follows. Daisy’s little daughter Pammy
enters with a “freshly laundered nurse,” likely a black woman in white, harking
back to Daisy’s own upbringing. Daisy fusses over her child, then gushes “did
mommy get powder on your old yellowy hair?” She kisses her “small white neck”
and calls her a “little dream.”
Pammy
responds with what seems like a non-sequitur: “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white
dress, too.”
Instinctively,
because it comes from a two-year-old, the reader will discount this remark as childish
babbling. However, interpreted literally, Pammy could be responding to her
mother’s babbling, with an honest insight: My aunt Jordan, your half-sister, is
covering up her “yellowy” skin with powder and a white dress.
Pammy’s
nurse quickly steps up and pulls the child out of the room.
_________________________
Jordan is the family
secret. The text of Gatsby makes
only fleeting allusions to Daisy’s family of origin, but from the description
of her youth—a white roadster and long line of suitors—she appears to be from the
cream of Louisville society. As for
Jordan, the clues to her parentage lie in the bizarre series of events
surrounding Daisy’s wedding to Tom. Jordan tells the story in two bursts, both
at the Plaza Hotel, itself a wedding venue.
Over
tea with Nick, she recalls being Daisy’s bridesmaid—the traditional role of a
younger sister. And like a bridesmaid in
a typical romance, she solves a crisis and delivers the bride to the altar.
The
night before the wedding, half an hour before the bridal dinner, she finds
Daisy in her room, “drunk as a monkey,” clutching an unidentified letter and
speaking in her down-home dialect, with a strong “negro” accent. “Tell ‘em all
Daisy’s change’ her mine,” blurts the bride-to-be, fishing Tom’s priceless
string of pearls out of a wastebasket, telling Jordan to “give ‘em back to whoever
they belong to.”
Jordan
leaps into action: “I rushed out and found her mother’s maid and we locked the
door and got her into a cold bath … We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice
on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an hour later when
we walked out of the room the pearls were around her neck and the incident was
over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a
shiver and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas” (93).
In
two paragraphs without a comma Fitzgerald spits out a half-hour of high drama. Knowing
exactly what they must do, Jordan and the maid transform Daisy from a drunken
“monkey” ready to spurn a fortune for a fantasy back into a Kentucky Belle
being prepared for sacrifice at the altar of wealth.
The
secret is in a curious, off-beat detail:
The woman Jordan rushes out to find is not Daisy’s maid, but Daisy’s
mother’s maid. With no time to talk, these two women work together as one to
save the day. They can do this only if
they know and trust each other implicitly, and perceive the situation in
exactly the same way. Plausibly, all these requirements are fulfilled because they
are mother and daughter, and have labored all their lives together to preserve
a system that grants them secure status, at the cost of their personal dignity
and freedom. Daisy’s heart’s desire must
now be sacrificed—just as Jordan’s mother had to sacrifice her integrity to
please the master of the house, just as Jordan had to sacrifice her authentic self
to pass as white. This could be the source of what Nick sees as her “clean,
hard, limited” personality, her scornful, contemptuous look and manner. Like Iago
in Shakespeare’s race-tinged tragedy, “I am not what I am.”
Jordan
can be understood as a child of the South— daughter of a white master, Daisy’s
father, and a black domestic servant, Daisy’s mother’s maid. This arrangement has
been common since the first slave ship arrived in Virginia in 1619. From Thomas Jefferson through Strom Thurmond
and beyond, white masters have exercised their droit de seigneur, with the inevitable result: a racial mix so
ubiquitous that no one could be sure of pure white ancestry—not even Daisy,
whose name evokes a yellow flower dressed in white.
And
this perhaps is the racial secret of chapter one: Daisy had been teasing Tom
with tales of miscegenation in the South, poking fun at his illusion of a pure Nordic
race.
________________________________
Jazz and the Jazz Age
blurred the boundaries between black and white. Just as slaves effaced the eight-tone scales of
western music, mixed-race African Americans like Jordan deliberately slid over the
color line, creating a new identity, a fake ID that opened the doors to white
America. And the movement went both ways
in the 1920s, as whites explored black culture in the cities of the North, and
came back with changed identities of their own.
Duke
Ellington, looking back in 1960, traced the birth of jazz to Harlem in the
early 1920s. The new music began to form
in the 1910s in New Orleans, Chicago, and the West Indies, he recalled. But not
until all these musicians “converged in New York and blended together” did jazz
emerge.
New
York was the magnet not just for African-Americans, but a huge influx of
immigrants from eastern and southern Europe—a picture that frightened the likes
of Tom Buchanan, and gave impetus to the politics of Nordic supremacy. In 1924, Congress passed a draconian
immigration law cutting off the flow of “inferior” groups. Gatsby is set in 1922, with the ethnic pot simmering and the Harlem
Renaissance permanently changing the tastes of the American masses.
Nick
feels it as he rides over the Queensborough Bridge in Gatsby’s yellow car, seeing
the city “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the
world.” As they cross the bridge two
parties pass them, going faster—first a funeral cortege with mourners who
“looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern
Europe,” then a limousine driven by a white chauffeur, “in which sat three
modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl.” Nick’s
reaction: “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge … anything
at all.”
Fitzgerald’s choice of the verb to slide is not an accident or an elegant variation. The whole scene evokes a historical-musical moment in which fixed categories are sliding away, obscuring and erasing the dividing lines between the beats of a measure, the notes of a scale, the nations and peoples of the world.
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"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter"
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Jazz, like all music, is composed of more than notes played or sung. Above each note are its overtones—sound waves that rise in ascending intervals, determining timbre and feeling. The sliding scale of jazz produces not just a pattern but a blur of overtones. This is the atmosphere of a tune, its aura. In the same way, the jazz history of The Great Gatsby is composed of more than words on the page.
The story of Daisy and Tom’s wedding ends with a coda in chapter seven, one floor above a “burst of jazz” from a wedding reception at the Plaza Hotel. Daisy recalls a last-minute mystery guest who fainted in the Louisville heat: “A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.” In Daisy’s husky, rhythmic voice this is a jazz riff, with a hesitation— “that’s a fact”—built in.
Nick picks up the theme; he knew a Bill Biloxi from Memphis. “That was his cousin,” says Jordan, who adds they carried Biloxi to her house, just two doors from the church, and he stayed three weeks, until “Daddy” told him to get out. The day after he left, “Daddy” died—though Jordan says “there wasn’t any connection.” Biloxi meanwhile left her with a gift— an aluminum putter she still uses.
The
profusion of B’s, X’s, O’s and I’s in this nest of names provides the riff with
a likely reference. The letters in Biloxi, shuffled like blocks or “boxed” like
numbers in lottery games, quickly turn up “Bix.” And the displacement of Biloxi,
Mississippi to Tennessee simulates— syncopates—the movement of jazz up the
Mississippi River to Memphis, toward Bix Beiderbecke’s hometown of Davenport,
Iowa.
Beiderbecke
made his debut recordings—including “Davenport Blues”—in 1924, while Fitzgerald
was finishing Gatsby. There is no record
of the two meeting, but Fitzgerald was highly unlikely not to have heard of the
latest sensation in the world of jazz. Here, Bix is just a fleeting note, an overtone
of the shape-shifting Biloxi, “bumming his way home,” free as his companion Asa
Bird (syncopated— “as a bird").
If
Jordan is an African American infiltrating the lily-white world of American golf,
Beiderbecke was her real-life mirror image—the first white jazzman to be admired
by African Americans. Probably no one in Jordan’s house during those three
weeks was what they appeared to be, her “Daddy” no more her father than Biloxi
was president of Nick and Tom’s class at Yale. And this could be what killed
“Daddy”—two fellow imposters communing together, turning his home into a
funhouse of American illusion. The gift of the putter (aluminum, false silver)
even suggests the cause of death: a stroke, the last in a series.
This
is the improvisatory play of Fitzgerald’s jazz text—meanings hovering over the narrative,
harmonics only hinted at by the words on the page. As surely as his
contemporary Beiderbecke, Fitzgerald used overtones to create multiple layers
of meaning, not a subtext but a supertext, like the
nightclub haze over a jazz band.
____________________________
As
twin icons of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald and Beiderbecke had much in common. Both were born to upper-middle-class parents in the Midwest,
on the banks of the Mississippi River—Fitzgerald in 1896 in St. Paul, Beiderbecke
in 1903, 350 miles south in Iowa. Each
became a celebrated artist in the intoxicated atmosphere of the 1920s. And each
fell victim to what Fitzgerald called “Early Success,” the premature triumph that
gives an artist the chance to be “somebody besides oneself,” with the
inevitable consequences. Each was suspected of “queer” tendencies in an
age when this was considered pathological. Each “cracked up” when the Jazz Age did. Each drank heavily and died young—Beiderbecke
at 28, Fitzgerald at 44.
Beyond
biography, a legend surrounds both lives and connects them with artists of an
earlier age, the Romantic Era. Biographer
Brendan Wolfe writes, “the heart of the Romantic Legend of Bix … is connecting
this idea of the searching quality of his art with the fact of his early death”
(Wolfe, 151). The image is of the artist pining away over something just out of
reach. Still, there is an essential difference between the searching qualities
of the Romantic poets and those of the Jazz Age. In a nightingale or a skylark, Keats and
Shelley gave existence to what lay beyond human ken, a Platonic conception of
beauty as real but inaccessible. For Fitzgerald and Beiderbecke, what beckons
is not even there.
It is jazz, the music of a new era, that spiritually connects these two white Midwesterners. In the only interview with Bix Beiderbecke ever printed, he defines jazz as music aiming “to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor … Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.”
Surprise—the humor of jazz—is in what isn’t there: the missing downbeat, the fade-out followed by a jump-back, the sexual underside of a blues lyric. African-American theologian Howard Thurman interpreted this deceptive style as a strategy to fool white people, a way of “creative survival” for the powerless. Ironically, it was adopted into white culture and became the style of an era. As critic Mitchell Breitwieser suggests, the Jazz Age was not something to be gained, not a national spirit but the absence of one—an “orgastic future” that could be pursued but never attained.
Beiderbecke’s solos typically burst upward, tearing open his sheath of sound with abrasive, even guttural peaks. But he never ends with a climax. The cornet lead recedes, often hangs on a single note (e.g. the end of his solo in “Singin’ the Blues”) and finally trails off with an ironic, self-deprecating squiggle, or a stray drumbeat, as in “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.”
In the same way, Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby by pulling back from an ecstatic vision. In the final scene, a late-night reverie on Gatsby’s abandoned beach, Nick re-imagines the beginning of the American dream, when Dutch sailors supposedly looked on the “fresh green breast of a new world.” There, the trees “pandered in whispers” and man was “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (218). That wonder, though, was “neither understood nor desired,” and never realized. Going backward in the text of Gatsby, the “fresh green breast of a new world” turns into a valley of ashes, and the wondering eyes of the Dutch sailors into the “pale, enormous eyes” of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg—something commensurate with our capacity for horror.
Trees don’t pander. It is the human capacity for wonder that dazzles the mind, that sets it on its tragic course. Fitzgerald presents his jazzed vision of a world gone wrong, but he pulls back from that as well.
He exempts and exonerates his hero, the ill-fated James Gatz. He fills in the back story of “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (156) —a small-town American boy setting out to improve himself, who strikes gold in a chance encounter with a tycoon, then wins glory, and briefly a girl, in the wartime uniform that effaces class origins. He offers evidence of delusionary thinking, such as Gatsby’s insistence that he can repeat the past, “fix everything just the way it was before.” He depicts Gatz’s childhood, in the sentimental memories of a father who—not incidentally—beat the boy. But he demurs at an analysis. Narrator Nick ends chapter five on a syncopated, empty beat, an overtone fading in the air: “Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling on them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
______________________________
There
are no second acts in The Great Gatsby,
nothing to look forward to, no possible sequel. The world imagined through
Gatsby’s eyes simply disappears after his death, his “huge incoherent failure
of a house” empty on the shore (217). The characters retreat: Tom and Daisy
“back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept
them together”— Jordan into her subterfuges, covering her breakup with Nick
with a supposed engagement to a nameless fiancé.
Nick retreats to his Middle West, to its “bored, sprawling, swollen towns” and dinner parties where each event was “hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.” His future—like Fitzgerald’s, like the Jazz Age—is a disappearing act. On his thirtieth birthday, he foresees “a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair…
“So we drove on toward death in the cooling twilight.”
In
the end the closest thing to a solid object—a survivor—is Tom. Nick encounters
him on Fifth Avenue and tries to get away, but Tom forces him to listen. Tom’s version of the “holocaust” he
engineered is entirely self-serving. It
was all right to set Wilson after Gatsby, “he had it coming to him.” He
pronounces Gatsby’s vision dead: “He threw dust into your eyes just like he did
in Daisy’s.” Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Tom extracts a handshake from Nick, a symbolic bow to the ruling class
and its solid, illusory world view.
Thus
ended the Jazz Age, prematurely capitulating well before the end of the
decade. Reflecting on it in “Echoes of
the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald wrote it was like “a children’s party taken over by
the elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken
aback.”
Little
was left of this age of excess and “miracles” after the market
crash of 1929. But jazz music was not
dependent on the illusions of the Jazz Age, being born not of excess but of suffering.
It thrived in the Depression, and dominated the Swing Era into the 40's. Meanwhile Gatsby
rose from the ashes to be recognized as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece after his
death in 1940. It is a text with all the
elements of great jazz: syncopation, formal elegance, free play, humor and
satire, “ugly beauty,” a haze of overtones, indeterminacy, irresolution.
Jazz is meant to elude, literature to endure. In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald captured the “elusive rhythm” of jazz in enduring form. Nearly 100 years later, it is still disappearing before our eyes.
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