[In the following essay, Breitwieser explores ways in which Fitzgerald used the phrases “the Jazz Age” and “The Last Tycoon” to define epochs in American literary history, prefiguring the discipline which would become American studies.]

An earlier version of this essay was presented at “History in the Making: The Future of American Literary Studies,” a conference held at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in late March 1999. At the beginning of my talk, I remarked that I had grown up in Monona, a small town about five miles from the campus, and that I earned my BA from UW-Madison in 1975. Preparing for the talk, I confessed, had stirred up memories, among them my first reading of The Great Gatsby (1925), which powerfully evoked what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the promise of life. My students, I noted, hearing again that elusive tune I had heard 25 years before, tend to dislike, affably, my middle-aged reading, for instance my claims concerning Nick Carraway's bad faith or my preference for the centrifugal disturbances of Tender is the Night (1933). In the difference between my reading and theirs I see that, though Fitzgerald still interests me deeply, he has changed, or rather, the center of his gravity has for me moved not only to the discoveries of his later fiction but also to certain facets I had not noticed in The Great Gatsby, where he begins to think critically about history, about race, class, region, nationality, and about how the intersections of such powers provoke, shape, and frustrate desire. Fitzgerald's writing seems to me now less an expression and celebration of pure longing than an archaeology of American desire—not the unbroken lineage from Dutch explorers to Jazz Age dreamer that Fitzgerald posited at the end of his most famous work, but a sedimentation of desires, like the layers of Troy or the layers of meanings Freud peeled away in the analysis of the symptom—“America” as a condensation, aggregate, or depository of subject-residues, rather than a mystical being. This, I would say, is where Fitzgerald parts company from Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway and keeps company with William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston, his historical sense laying the foundation for what would be called American studies and prefiguring some of the disciplinary transformations within literary study that were the topic of “History in the Making.” To sketch out something of that prefiguration, I reflected on two terms, “the Jazz Age” and “The Last Tycoon.” Since the term “Jazz Age” appears in the 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” a postmortem of the 1920s, we have in both phrases an announcement that an American epoch has ended, an implied analysis of the subjective forms that the epoch produced, and speculations concerning the forces that brought about the end. I differentiated the two terms by contrasting the melancholia that typifies endings in The Great Gatsby and the 1931 essay with some new ways of thinking about social and personal coherence that Fitzgerald was exploring at the time of his death in 1940.

First, then, the “Jazz Age.” For Fitzgerald the term may have resonated humorously with Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age—periodizations of archaic humanity that came into use among archaeologists during the second half of the nineteenth century. If so, the irony is two-sided: first, whereas an “age” used to span centuries, the velocity of change is now such that we run through an age in 10 years or so, as long as it takes a culture-defining group of young people to follow the arc of its third decade; and second, whereas the universal plastic material that defines us used to be substance—stone, bronze, iron—it is now an intense, ungraspable cultural energy, jazz, “an arrangement of notes that will never be played again,” as Nick Carraway says of Daisy Buchanan's voice (11).¹

As fundamental material, jazz saturates the culture of its epoch, supplying people, events, and artifacts with the character by which they are most succinctly grasped. The term “Jazz Age” therefore imputes to 1920s jazz what Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar call “expressive causality” (310), which “describe[s] the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence” (316). Althusser and Balibar's “but only” indicate their conviction that “expression” is a restrictive way to understand a society, that there are more complex and satisfying ways to think about parts and wholes, an idea, I will eventually argue, that Fitzgerald was approaching as he wrote The Last Tycoon (1941). But for now, let's stay with the idea of expressive causality, with, in Fitzgerald's case, a temporary national whole of which the parts are expressions, which is what makes an epoch—when the parts break away from their expressivity, become dark and single, then begin to recohere around a new core, the epoch gives way to its successor. Fitzgerald's commitment to expressive structure is especially evident in his post-Emersonian linkage between charisma and history, his belief, first, that in their alertness to the spirit of the epoch, remarkable individuals such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr are like “those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (6), and second, the belief that such harbingers will catalyze a similar spirit among those who enter the remarkable man's zone of self-display. Expressing the whole, the members of a transcendent avant-garde lead lesser persons to discover their latent character as symbols of the nation. Like his social vision, Fitzgerald's symbolist aesthetic is undergirded by his passionate theoretical commitment to the transcendent whole, his spiritual and libidinal nationalism appropriating the emotional and theoretical energies of his Roman Catholic upbringing—the essence of the nation bestows the kiss of worth on objects that then partake of its splendor by expressing it symbolically.² America is where the Eucharist couples with the commodity fetish, a fervent articulation of American exceptionalism that influenced such literary works as On the Road (1957) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and that anticipated in fiction the line of scholars from Henry Nash Smith and Charles Feidelson through Richard Slotkin to Sacvan Bercovitch. Perhaps even more than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitzgerald is the prose poet of what Lauren Berlant calls the “National Symbolic”—“the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to, the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity; through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright” (20).

The symbolicity of the symbol—its character as vessel containing abstract reality or as portal opening onto wonder—supplies the symbolic thing with its vitality. Failing that access, the thing is a mere thing, a dispirited outcome that in The Great Gatsby is figured as “foul dust” or ashes—devitalized remainder (6). These symbols of nonsymbolicity are extremely interesting to me, because they are the valleys where Fitzgerald, or his narrator at least, confines social life that fails to express the ideal (revulsion marking that place where insight will later appear). Insofar as a person is a living seismograph of the ideal, a pure register of abstract national content, he is truly vital, alive, luminous; insofar as he is particular—a person with projects, worries, tics, pleasures, and sorrows, all of them inflected by ethnicity, region, religion, class, gender, parental neurochemistry, and so on—he is a failure, merely particular, an outpost in which the rhythms of the capital have long since been forgotten. Determination by real circumstance and the complexity that this yields are markers of inadequacy. This is why Gatsby is great: he is always and only desirer-of-Daisy, and not desiring her as a particular woman, but desiring her for the abstract stuff that she is “full of” (94).

To exemplify the spirit of the nation is therefore to be a knight of desire, like Søren Kierkegaard's knight of virtue, for whom purity of heart is to will one thing. But what if the one thing that the symbol incarnates—the essence that makes the epoch an epoch—is not itself at one with itself, but rather fractured, internally complex? As my title suggests, this brings us back to jazz, the primal X of the decade. Jazz is mentioned most often in Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, Nick's excited account of the first party he attended across the lawn at Gatsby's: “By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky” (51). A little later,

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension and added “Some sensation!” whereupon everyone laughed.

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World.”

However: “The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes” (54). This is a briefly puzzling moment—if Nick is simply distracted by Gatsby's appearance, why doesn't he say, “but I didn't hear the piece because” rather than “the nature of the piece eluded me because”? Several years ago I found the answer to this question in Fitzgerald's manuscript, which includes a long description of the “Jazz History” that was cut from the final version:

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as Les Epstien's Jazz History of the World.”

When he sat down all the members of the orchestra looked at one another and smiled as tho this was after all a little below them after all. Then the conductor raised his wand—and they all launched into one of the most surprising pieces of music I've ever heard in my life. It fascinated me. perhaps it was the champagne I've never heard it since and perhaps it was the champagne but for about fifteen minutes I don't think anyone stirred in their chairs—except to laugh now and then in a curious puzzled way when they came to the end of a movement.

It started out with a weird, spinning sound that seemed to come mostly from the cornets, very regular and measured and inevitable with a bell now and then that seemed to ring somewhere a good distance away. A rythm became distinguishable after a while in the spinning, a sort of dull beat but as soon as you'd almost made it out it disappeared—until finally something happened, something tremendous, you knew that, and the spinning was all awry and one of the distant bells had come alive, it had a meaning and a personality somehow of its own.

That was the first movement and we all laughed and looked at each other rather nervously as the second movement began. [new paragraph mark] The second movement was concerned with the bell only it wasn't the bell anymore but two intrum wi a muted violin cello and two instruments I had never seen before. At first there was a sort of monotony about it—a little disappointing at first as if it were just a repitition of the spinning sound but pretty soon you were aware that something was trying to establish itself, to get a foothold, something soft and persistent and profound and next you yourself were trying to help it, struggling, praying for it—until suddenly it was there, it was established rather scornfully without you and it stayed there seemed to lurk around as with a complete self-sufficiency as if it had been there all the time.

I was curiously moved and the third part of the thing was full of an even stronger emotion. I know so little about music that I can only make a story of it—which proves I've been told that it must have been pretty low brow stuff—but it wasn't really a story. He didn't have lovely music for the prehistoric ages with tiger-howls from the trap finishing up with a strain ffrom Onward Christian Soldiers in the year two B. C. If wsn't like that at all. There would be a series of interruptive notes that seemed too fall together accidently and colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed to it outside. But what struck me particularly was that just as you'd get used to the new discord business there'd be one of the old themes rung in this time as a discord until you'd get a ghastly sense that it was all a cycle after all, purposeless and sardonic until you wanted to get up and walk out of the garden. It never stopped—after they had finished playing that movement it went on and on in everybody's head until the next one started. Whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.

The last was weak I thought though [ ] most of the people seemed to like it best of all. It had recognizable strains of famous jazz in it—Alexander's Ragtime Band and the Darktown Strutter's Ball and recurrent hint of The Beale Street Blues. It made me restless and looking casually around my eye was caught by the straight, graceful easy figure of well proportioned well-made figure of Gatsby who stood alone on the his steps looking from one group to another with a strange eagerness in his eyes. It was as though he felt the necessity of supplying, physically at least, a perfect measure of entertainment to his guests. He seemed absolutely alone—I never seen anyone who seemed so alone.

(The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile 54-56)

Startling, fascinating, ultimately dismaying, and even frightening in its manifest but inexplicable logic, the “Jazz History” seems not to express its audience, but rather to stand in sardonic or satiric relation to them, making them drop their hilarity and mutuality, and to look to one another for a reassurance that none can supply to the others. But the dismay and consequent revulsion Nick feels do not overwhelm an obvious interest: “I was curiously moved.” The nature of the piece eludes him, he says, just when he seems to be about to have it in hand: it seems to have a core, but it veers off just when about to present itself. The performance does not venture into the unexpected in order to return to the domestic consolation of familiar motifs or melodies: even the return of familiar elements is uncanny and threatening, since those elements, when they recur, are embedded in a miasma that distorts them not beyond recognition, but in such a way that recognition and disorientation become the same thing. The music seems to amplify rather than to soothe the party's echolalia.

Such a contortion of the familiar world breaks out at several points in the novel, for instance in Nick's speculations concerning Gatsby's last moments: “[H]e must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid too high a price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about …” (169). Material, without being real: only the ideal confers real reality on material things, and lacking it they become nightmares. “[D]isruptions in the realm of the National Symbolic,” according to Berlant, “create a collective sensation of almost physical vulnerability: the subject without a nation experiences his/her own mortality and vulnerability because s/he has lost control over physical space as a part of his/her inheritance” (24).

Even when the East excited me most … it had always a quality of distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

(185)

The wonder, interest, and horror of “The Jazz History of the World” is that its distortion of the world is a deliberate human production, rather than a symptom of postepochal decay: it is an artifact, not a ruin. Nick and Fitzgerald are baffled by and irresistibly interested in what seems to them to be the enormous perversity of the act of intentionally disconnecting things from their expressivity and turning them into stranded, carefully fashioned monstrosities—terminating expression, dissevering the conduit that makes things really real, assiduously producing a residue of unique creations that only a rather total failure of attention could assign to a category such as ashes or junk. Though the excised passage does not associate such intentional distortion with African-American cultural practice, a 1926 letter thanking Carl Van Vechten for a copy of his novel Nigger Heaven (1926) makes the connection clearly: “[Your novel] seems, outside of its quality as a work of art, to sum up subtly and inclusively, all the direction of the northern nigger, or, rather, the nigger in New York. Our civilization imposed on such virgin soil takes on a new and more vivid and more poignant horror as if it had been dug out of its context and set down against an accidental and unrelated background” (Fitzgerald, Letters 490).³

Those readers who listen to jazz may have concluded that, despite the incomprehension and ethnocentric or racist revulsion, Fitzgerald realized what jazz is. Compare his account of “The Jazz History of the World,” for instance, with André Hodeir's analysis of Louis Armstrong's “Butter and Egg Man,” written in the 1950s about a recording from the time Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby:

In this record, Armstrong manages to transfigure completely a theme whose vulgarity might well have overwhelmed him; and yet his chorus is only a paraphrase. The theme is not forgotten for a moment; it can always be found there, just as it was originally conceived by its little-known composer, Venable. Taking off melodically from the principal note of the first phrase, the soloist begins with a triple call that disguises, behind its apparent symmetry, subtle differences in rhythm and expressive intensity. This entry by itself is a masterpiece; it is impossible to imagine anything more sober and balanced. During the next eight bars, the paraphrase spreads out, becoming freer and livelier. Armstrong continues to cling to the essential notes of the theme, but he leaves more of its contour to the imagination. At times he gives it an inner animation by means of intelligent syncopated repetitions, as in the case of the first note of the bridge. From measures 20 to 30, the melody bends in a chromatic descent that converges toward the theme while at the same time giving a felicitous interpretation of the underlying harmonic progression. This brings us to the culminating point of the work. Striding over the traditional pause of measures 24-25, Armstrong connects the bridge to the final section by using a short, admirably inventive phrase. Its rhythmic construction of dotted eighths and sixteenths forms a contrast with the more static context in which it is placed, and in both conception and execution it is a miracle of swing. During this brief moment, Louis seems to have foreseen what modern conceptions of rhythm would be like. In phrasing, accentuation, and the way the short note is increasingly curtailed until finally it is merely suggested (measure 25) how far removed all this is from New Orleans rhythm!

(qtd. in Hadlock 30)

Hodeir is free of the discomfort that suffuses the Fitzgerald passage, but the point is the same, which makes Fitzgerald's excised fragment—itself set adrift from the novelistic whole it would have quite significantly failed to express—one of the first perceptive reactions to jazz performance among white American writers. By contrast, Rudy Vallee's dismay seems much less alert: “Truly I have no conception of what ‘jazz’ is, but I believe the term should be applied … to the weird orchestral effects of various colored bands up in Harlem. … These bands have a style all their own, and at times it seems as though pandemonium had broken loose. Most of the time there is no distinguishable melody. … [I]t is absolutely impossible for even a musical ear to tell the name of the piece” (qtd. in Stearns 182). Though partaking of Vallee's perplexity, Fitzgerald anticipates Hodeir's understanding that jazz by design offers no reunion with the already known, but rather, by way of improvisation, disconnects the familiar from its familiarity, making it do startling things. To someone as intensely and deeply committed to a sacramental and holistic conception of art and society as Fitzgerald was at this time in his life, such created tension could only appear as a fracture, a break in the body of the work and in the body politic, an alienation shared even by so recent and influential a critic as Ted Gioia:

An aesthetics of jazz would almost be a type of non-aesthetics. Aesthetics, in principle if not in practice, focuses our attention on those attributes of a work of art which reveal the craftsmanship and careful planning of the artist. Thus the terminology of aesthetic philosophy—words such as form, symmetry, balance—emphasizes the methodical element in artistic creation. But the improviser is anything but methodical; hence these terms have only the most tangential applicability to the area of jazz. The very nature of jazz demands spontaneity; were the jazz artist to approach his music in a methodical and calculated manner, he would cease to be an improviser and become a composer. For this reason the virtues we search for in other art forms—premeditated design, balance between form and content, an overall symmetry—are largely absent in jazz. In his act of impulsive creation, the improvising musician must shape each phase separately while retaining only a vague notion of the overall pattern he is forging. Like the great chess players who, we are told, must be able to plan their attack some dozens of moves ahead, the jazz musician must constantly struggle with his opaque medium if he hopes to create a coherent musical statement. His is an art markedly unsuited for the patient and reflective.

(55)

Fitzgerald's perception of jazz performance in the excised passage might seem to be more astute than a remark in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”: “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war” (16). But notice that Fitzgerald does not say this is what jazz is, but rather this is what jazz has meant and what it has been associated with. He is not really departing from the insight of the excised passage, but rather changing the subject from jazz to the image of jazz in the middle-class white popular imagination. His feeling for the distinction accords with the subsequent judgment of cultural and social historians: thought of primarily in terms of its conspicuous and propulsive rhythm, jazz came to emblematize for white Americans both an erotic vitality nearly lost in an effete society (but still effective among African Americans) and the pace of postwar technological modernity. This is the image of jazz, jazz understood as energy and velocity, that is implied in the term “Jazz Age” and embodied in Gatsby, the restless, not-quite-really-white roughneck with the world's most extraordinary car. Leopold Stokowski succinctly articulated this understanding of jazz: “Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living, it is useless to fight against it. … America's contribution to the music of the past will have the same revivifying effect as the injection of new, and in the larger sense, vulgar blood into dying aristocracy. … The Negro musicians of America are playing a great part in this change” (qtd. in Ogren 7).⁴ Jazz could signify both primitivity and hypermodernity because in both cases it is thought of as raw energy preceding or outrunning form—a beat, rather than a conversation, a meditation, a paraphrase, or a discovery. An alternative form so radically disparate from popular performative norms as to be aesthetically unrecognizable to unexperienced listeners, jazz seems not to be form at all, only outburst.

When I talk about “real jazz” I mean to appeal only to a formal authenticity: we can, for example, say whether a poem is or is not a sonnet without recourse to mystical essentialism. The distinction between real jazz and the image of jazz became more tangled, however, when popularizers began to compose, perform, and record music that reflected the popular image of jazz. As such simulation gathers steam, the distinction between, say, the performances of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and what those performances are imagined to amount to is succeeded by the distinction between the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and, say, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, which was generally thought to be America's premiere ensemble. According to Burnett James, “Paul Whiteman, though called the ‘King of Jazz,’ fronted an orchestra of semi-symphonic proportions. His jazzmen had their way from time to time, but in essence only as a sideline” (15). Marshall Stearns expands this point:

The number of prosperous dance bands at the popular level multiplied, while the jazz content remained slight. At the same time, dancing the Charleston, the Black Bottom, and the Lindy was highly popular and the bands tried to oblige by playing a little hot jazz. … None of these large dance bands, however, could swing as a whole. The formula consisted of importing one or two “hot” soloists, or “get-off” men, letting them take a chorus once in a while surrounded by acres of uninspired fellow musicians. “Society band leaders like Meyer Davis and Joe Moss always wanted to have at least one good jazzman in their bands,” says clarinetist Tony Parenti. Bix Beiderbecke was doing this for Paul Whiteman in 1927. Beiderbecke was very well paid and his colleagues all looked up to him—the “hot” soloists were always the elite—but the frustration of being allowed to play so little, when he was hired because he could play so much, led to all kinds of personal problems and, indirectly, to the after-hours “jam session,” where a musician could play his heart out.

(180)⁵

Kathy Ogren agrees with this assessment of the dance bands, especially Whiteman's:

Whiteman, who became the “King of Jazz,” saw his role as that of dignifying and legitimating jazz. He … explained away certain characteristics and performance practices original to the music. Whiteman warned musicians against using syncopation, which “gives a sense to the ignorant of participation in the world's scientific knowledge.” But, Whiteman continued, with a sense of relief, “Syncopation no longer rules American music … as we use it in the United States [it] is an African inheritance … but to-day it is no longer a necessary thing. It has been retained much as an ornament.” Whiteman's popular music became so closely identified with jazz that many Americans had no knowledge of its Afro-American origins. Whiteman himself, who disliked the association with jazz and dance music, titled his Aeolian Hall concert an “Experiment in Modern Music.”

(159)

The Aeolian Hall concert is a key cultural locus for my argument: commencing with some horsing around on “Livery Stable Blues” (1917) (introduced by Whiteman as “an example of the depraved past from which modern jazz has risen” [Ogren 161]), the orchestra proceeded through Tin Pan Alley numbers such as “Yes We Have No Bananas” (1923), escalated to the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), with George Gershwin on piano, and concluded with Edward Elgar's “Pomp and Circumstance” (1901-07). The sequence of the performance thus seems like a progression from energy to art, an effect that depends on agreeing with Whiteman's pronouncement that the structural core of jazz is an African ornament that can be sacrificed without significant loss in order to move to an aesthetic high ground. Where we might see a nonjazz orchestra equipped with a couple of jazz “stunts,” whinnying trumpets, and some boosted drumming, Whiteman claimed that his music was jazz emerged from its cocoon, its inner necessity fulfilled.

Thanks to extensive advance publicity, the Aeolian Hall concert was packed—invitations had been sent to Stokowski, Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Van Vechten, and many other prominent white New Yorkers—and the response was tumultuous (Jablonski 66-67; Stearns 165-67). The concert was performed on 12 February 1924, a couple of months before the Fitzgeralds sailed for France; their celebrity at the time was such that they may have been included on the guest list, though I have been unable to discover whether they were invited or attended. In any case, the coverage in the New York papers after the concert was so extensive that Fitzgerald could not have failed at least to hear about the occasion. I am satisfied that the Aeolian Hall concert was the prototype for “The Jazz History of the World,” a lineage first suggested, as far as I can tell, by Darrell Mansell.⁶ (Mansell suggests that Fitzgerald may also have been thinking of jazz-inflected works by Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky.) If Fitzgerald is in fact alluding to Whiteman's hubristic and ethnically defamatory extravaganza, the allusion is rather biting: though the excised passage seems at points to describe “Rhapsody in Blue,” it nonetheless alludes to, stays close to, what jazz is at its core, to what Whiteman called unnecessary ornament, a trope not far from Fitzgerald's “foul dust.” The performance at Gatsby's party, therefore, were Fitzgerald to have left the excised fragment in, would have put on view a rather fabulous cultural reversal, jazz per se reviving or breaking out at the heart of an event staged to curtail jazz and to appropriate its aura, not only an overturning of Whiteman's pretension but also an exuberant betrayal of the aesthetic norms governing the book in which it would have been enclosed. Though it is as hard to say for sure what Fitzgerald listened to as it is to prove he was at the Aeolian Hall concert, I am quite sure he would have heard the real thing as well as the smooth simulacrum: it is hard to imagine him not joining in on Van Vechten's Harlem fieldtrips, and in France Fitzgerald's friend and fellow émigré Gerald Murphy made a point of having the latest jazz records on hand—his yacht, the Weatherbird, took its name from an Armstrong record that he had sealed in the yacht's keel, a recording made two years after “Butter and Egg Man” (Tomkins 32, 116-17).

But if Fitzgerald heard jazz per se, his narrator nevertheless responds with aversion to what Thelonious Monk would later call jazz's ugly beauty, and the excised passage shows no awareness of the African-American motivations for jazz performance. If the serial paraphrasing that Nick hears seems to him to be a prolonged deformity or brutalization, to the performer improvisation means a kind of circumstance-based freedom, taking an element from the dominant culture, twisting it, turning it around and inside-out, seeing if it will serve ends other than the usual and familiar ones. Like experiment in general, it seeks to discover avenues of possibility through the midst of inevitability, and to do so without special worry about the survival of coherence. It is useful to recall Ralph Ellison's praise of Armstrong in the preface to Invisible Man (1952):

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music.

(8)

Willfully putting fidelity to the original aside, the performer liberates cultural matter, puts it into motion. Though this sort of individual departure from script seems to Nick to endanger the coherence and recognizability of the whole—to endanger the sort of expressive structure that Fitzgerald saw in his vision of American sacramentalism—in fact it adumbrates a radically different vision of cohesion, if not of wholeness in its ultimately metaphysical sense. Martin Williams explains this other vision well:

In all its styles, jazz involves some degree of collective ensemble improvisation, and in this it differs from Western music even at those times in its history when improvisation was required. The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and co-operation required in a jazz ensemble carry with them philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a co-operative social structure, can actually enhance society.

(252)

My feeling that Fitzgerald came to a similar conclusion about jazz's motive brings me to The Last Tycoon, the novel on which he was working when he died of heart failure in 1940. Monroe Stahr, loosely based on Irving Thalberg, is Hollywood's most successful producer, dominating and organizing the ensemble of labor at his studio—drunken writers, extras, peevish celebrities, lighting men, etc.—with a firm, bluff, equable, brilliant, and self-assured demeanor that commands instant respect from all and yields successful collective enterprise. He thus recapitulates the social potency of Gatsby and Dick Diver from the preceding novels, but because he has found a young industry in a young place, his potency can exercise itself in legitimate business triumph rather than in crime, Riviera beach parties, or obsession with the daughters of old money. Because Hollywood is the last new industry and California is the geographical terminal beach for the series of longings that began with Dutch sailors staring at Long Island. Stahr is the last tycoon. He therefore culminates and closes an epoch somewhat longer than the Jazz Age, the century, more or less, from Andrew Jackson's election to the time of the novel. The commencement date is established early on in The Last Tycoon, when three characters enduring a long stopover during a transcontinental flight take an early-morning cab ride out to Jackson's mansion, The Hermitage. The first couple of times I read the novel this interlude seemed rather pointless, until it occurred to me that Fitzgerald meant us to see Jackson as the first tycoon—not a businessman, but a charismatic and unorthodox westerner who marshaled broad-spectrum appeal independently from established elites, creating in the process the economic domain in which the subsequent tycoons down to Stahr would flourish. From Jackson to Stahr, then, we have the Tycoon Age, with Stahr's life being the epoch's sunset, the moment when structure crumbles and the individuated pieces shed their expressivity, the luster they enjoyed while they stood firm in Stahr's light.

The novel is very unfinished. In what we do have, Fitzgerald launches the plot along two arcs, the thematic relations between which are not at first clear. First, Stahr is suffering the strain of overwork to the point of risking his life. Producing effective charisma is no longer an effortless or fulfilling enterprise, in part because Stahr's belief in the worth of his work, in the quality of his films, is diminished; and this subterranean slippage is aggravated by widening divisions in the studio, conspiratorial maneuverings by rivals whose crass profiteering is an index of their contempt for the moviegoing public, and advancing unionization among the laborer-writers. Such splitting and fraying suggests to Stahr that, despite his titanic labors, he only has a limited number of rabbits left in his hat.

In the second plot line, Stahr meets by chance a woman named Kathleen who closely resembles his dead wife Minna, an actress, and the resemblance stirs him from his apathy into a desperate and eerie erotic pursuit that recalls Edgar Allan Poe's “Ligeia” (1838) and anticipates Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958): “It was Minna's face—the skin with its peculiar radiance as if phosphorus had touched it, the mouth with its warm line that never counted costs—and over all the haunting jollity that had fascinated a generation” (64). As in those texts, the generative problem is the quandary of second love. If one is destined to love some one, then the act of doing so expresses his fundamental inner truth, his profoundest self, the continuity to which all changes can be subordinated. When love is seen this way, there can be no second love—either the first or the second must have only seemed to be love—because a second love would mean that the lover had a fluid or split core, and that change can therefore be radical. Recall Gatsby's incredulity when Daisy says she loved Tom too. The narrative of the second beloved who reincarnates or exactly resembles the first papers over this fracture in desire and in the desiring self by allowing the supposition that the second love is the first beloved redevivus. But in several quite stirring and uncomfortably beautiful encounters, Stahr seems to discover Kathleen's mystery, her difference from Minna, and this discovery only deepens the attraction, without provoking any severe crisis in self-image. Relinquishing the obsessive and coercive concern with near-exact repetition that predominates in Poe and Hitchcock, Fitzgerald quickly establishes Kathleen's not-Minnaness, with wisps of abiding uncanny reminder, as if, perhaps, second love improvises on the first, “to repeat yet not recapitulate the past” (89).

It should be clear what I consider to be the deep link between the two plot lines, the opening of divisions within what had seemed to be secure wholes—between Stahr and his profession, within his professional world, within his ambition and within his desire—splinterings that Fitzgerald emblematizes as the dispersal of light-sources: “Other lights shone in Hollywood since Minna's death: in the open markets lemons and grapefruits and green apples slanted a misty glare into the street. Ahead of him the stop-signal of a car winked violet and at another crossing he watched it wink again. Everywhere floodlights raked the sky. On an empty corner two mysterious men moved a gleaming drum in pointless arcs over the heavens” (62). This dispersed glow recurs later, on a Pacific beach near a half-completed house Stahr is having built. He takes Kathleen there one night for what turns out to be one of the most frank and moving sexual encounters to be found in Fitzgerald, who is usually prudish where the act is concerned. It is both funny and touching when their postcoital barefoot stroll along the ocean brings them into a field of squirming light, dozens of sparkling, spawning grunion, shiny, sexual, fecund, an extraordinary organic improvisation on what happened just moments before in Stahr's oceanside hermitage: “It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn and the little silver fish rocked off shore waiting for 10:16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop in the sand. A Negro man came along the shore toward them collecting the grunion quickly like twigs into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore” (92-93).⁷ In Fitzgerald's novels, African Americans commonly appear at the moment when the main characters' world is deeply disturbed, as if breaking-up is also breaking-open. Only in The Last Tycoon, though, is that disturbance refreshing and inexplicably inspiring—a sense of possibility perhaps enhanced by the echo between Drake's arrival in California and the transfixed gaze of the Dutch sailors at the end of The Great Gatsby. The man on the beach tells Stahr and Kathleen that he doesn't really come for the fish, but rather to read Emerson, a copy of which he is carrying in his shirt. His pensiveness is confirmed a moment later when, on hearing that Stahr makes movies, he remarks that he and his children don't go to the movies, “because there's no profit in it.” He continues down the beach, “unaware that he had rocked an industry” by shining this harsh light on Stahr's already-uneasy feeling of professional worth (93).

“Now they were different people as they started back” (94). The conversation with the man on the beach and the sexual interlude with Kathleen upset the elementary articles of Stahr's self-image, his commitment to his work, and his loyalty to his desire for his wife, but these inner fractures turn out not to be premonitions of subjective decay of the kind Fitzgerald described in “The Crack-Up” (1935) and depicted in Tender is the Night. Instead, they crack Stahr open, rather than up, investing him with an intuition of life below the monolithic, frozen unities of the tycoon and romantic love systems. This post-epochal intuition runs underground while he drives Kathleen home, then surfaces. We should recognize the terms Fitzgerald uses to describe Stahr's anomalous epiphany:

Winding down the hill he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto-horns from the Technicolor boulevards below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that the music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass—this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score.

(96-97)

Lest we be ignorant of the source of such music, Fitzgerald immediately adds: “Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the Negro on the sand” (96). Without the disgust—“he liked and did not understand”—Fitzgerald returns to the insight of the excised fragment, acknowledging jazz's cultural origins and motivations, its allegiance to a future contemplated as something more interesting than the return of fulfillment.

Fitzgerald's early death strikes all the more sharply, for me at least, when I think about this new way of thinking that he was laboring so hard to convey, the series of discoveries of the real that The Last Tycoon would have been about—desire that is not a suburb of commodity-fetishism, labor politics, uninhibited capitalism, the self and the nation as diverse and nonself-identical. He was on the verge of something, like Stahr's unbuilt house, permanently unbuilt.

How did he come to that continental extremity? Perhaps something of an answer lies in the difference between Emerson's “Representative Man,” who has something, some mystical X that he bestows, and Gatsby, who has only desire, that is, who lacks rather than has, bestowing only a sharply focused version of others' more diffuse lacking. Gatsby apprises one that he shares an absence at the core, a vacancy that precedes the fantasms that address themselves to that vacancy—mystic nationhood, voices full of money, and fresh green breasts. If Fitzgerald found himself in the predicament Nick surmises in Gatsby, “[paying] too high a price for living too long with a single dream” (169), then he may have turned to face the constitutive deficit that the pursuit of the dream had been designed to distract him from. If the common feature of the artifacts in the American archaeological dig is longing, then perhaps the common feature of American experience is not the nation but rather the absence of the nation, temporalized as not yet. This feeling of the absence of the nation is historically produced by the deep belief that there ought to be—and that there could be—a nation, that is, a political and spiritual object that compensates for the extreme losses that typify the experience of modernity. I derive this conception of the nation as imaginary compensation from Benedict Anderson:

The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering—disease, mutilation, grief, age and death. Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralyzed? Why is my daughter retarded? … At the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child's conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity and fatality, in a language of “continuity”?

Shortly later, Anderson addresses the predicament of modernity:

[I]n Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, or rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than the idea of a nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical,” the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.

(18-19)

“The nation,” Homi Bhabha contends, “fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage,’ or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people” (291). The US is of course one of the special cases, since its immemorial pasts are European and Native American: the past of the locale entails ethnic difference, whereas ethnic continuities are not local, that is, they connect to other nations. In large measure, Fitzgerald's reference to the Dutch sailors has seemed to many readers an attempt to say, we do have our own time immemorial now, finally, and thereby to transfigure or positivize the peculiarly originary place that lacking has occupied in the imagination of American national self-constitution. What I am proposing is that Fitzgerald may in his last years have begun to shift his focus from fantasmatic reimbursements—the green breast in all its avatars—to constitutive hunger or deficit, and to contemplate such deficit as an opportunity, rather than as an occasion for stoic resignation. If I am right, this development would echo with Claude Lefort's notion of democracy (rather than of nation):

Power was embodied in the prince, and it therefore gave society a body. And because of this, a latent but effective knowledge of what one meant to the other existed throughout the social. This model reveals the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy. The locus of power becomes an empty place. There is no need to dwell on the details of the institutional apparatus. The important point is that this apparatus prevents governments from appropriating power for their own ends, from incorporating it into themselves. The exercise of power is subject to the procedures of periodical redistributions. It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict. The locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be occupied—it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it—and it cannot be represented.

(17)

Gazing from a Swiss mountain, Dick Diver observes a crucial vacuum that rivals, in its transfigured sorrow, Melville's Grand Armada, a play of figurality which is not restrained by a clear distinction between the thing and its shadow: “On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhone, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glinting on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows” (Fitzgerald, Tender 147-48).⁸ If the center is nothingness, then loneliness—the historical circumstance to which nationalism so ferociously and unsuccessfully responds—might come to seem mysteriously opportune, people and their things freed from the burden of symbolizing, finding their way through an epoch's ruin: “They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done, and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness, and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drug-store, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress, with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and, when it was over, the still life of their empty plates—a silver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone” (Fitzgerald, Love [The Love of the Last Tycoon] 85).

Notes

1. All future parenthetical references to the novel will refer to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text (1991) unless noted otherwise.

2. My understanding of the connection between nationalism, symbolization, and the simplification of historical reality is heavily indebted to John F. Callahan, The Illusions of a Nation:

   What, in America, have been the relations between complex human personality, history, and those myths summoned to explain the facts of history? What in the national past tempts succeeding generations to evade their history and seek mythologies of fraudulent innocence/particularly misleading, when applied to history, is the mythic mode's assumption that ongoing experience endlessly repeats past patterns of action and policy. Nevertheless, history and myth raise the same question for America: how does history rationalized subvert personality? How have dominant myths swayed consciousness away from complexity and freedom? Why have fixity, stereotype and a one-dimensional, denotative perception won out over fluidity, archetype, and personality in the round?

   (3)

3. I apologize for entering the term “nigger” into print. Would that it died out from misuse. But Fitzgerald's comment concerning the “direction” of African-American culture in New York seems important to me.

4. This quotation originally appeared in Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), but I found it in Ogren. Ogren's book has been extremely helpful. I am also indebted to Burton Paretti, The Creation of Jazz (1992); Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (1983); Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (1962); Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (1987); Stearns; Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968); and Gioia. I have been deeply affected by (and would like sometime to write an essay on) Sidney Bechet's autobiography, Treat it Gentle (1960). I am especially indebted to Richard Hadlock, both for his Jazz Masters of the Twenties, and for his weekly Sunday night radio show, “The Annals of Jazz,” from KCSM in San Mateo, CA, also at KCSM.org on the Web.

5. I am continually surprised that an extended comparison of the careers of Beiderbecke and Fitzgerald has not been attempted, perhaps because of their different performative media. The resonances are many: in addition to death from drinking, they share an upper midwestern origin, rapid and somewhat scandalous celebrity, the pressure of coming to terms with the constraints imposed by success, and a fine strain of alluring and disturbing melancholia.

6. For a discussion of the relation between jazz and symphonic performance during this period, see Bernard Gendron, “Jamming at Le Boeuf: Jazz and the Paris Avant-Garde” (1989-90).

7. My feeling that this is for Fitzgerald a breakthrough (rather than a breakdown) moment, and that he felt it to be so, is reinforced by the presence of an item from his personal erotic code, bare feet. In a ledger he composed to help him recall his early years, Fitzgerald recalled that in August 1901, he “went to Atlantic City—where some Freudean complex refused to let him display his feet, so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason” (Turnbull 9). For July 1903, he writes: “There was also a boy named Arnold who went barefooted in his yard and peeled plums. Scott's freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in” (Turnbull 11). In This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine is at one point the victim of a fantasmatic tormentor who leers at Blaine as if in full knowledge of Blaine's worst traits: “Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong … with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. … It was like weakness in a good woman, or food on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end. … They were unutterably terrible … (113). The “terrible incongruity” anticipates the “Jazz History,” so it is not surprising that the issue of race would surface shortly after: “The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze. … Axia's beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those feet … those feet …” (114).

8. See Callahan 82 on this passage.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left, 1970.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.

Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Bhabha, Homi. “DisseminNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322.

Callahan, John F. The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” The Crack-Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945.

———. The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text. New York: Scribner's, 1991.

———. The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington, DC: Microcard Editions, 1973.

———. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Andrew Turnbull. New York: Scribner's, 1963.

———. The Love of the Last Tycoon. New York: Scribner's, 1994.

———. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner's, 1986.

———. Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner's, 1962.

Gendron, Bernard. “Jamming at Le Boeuf: Jazz and the Paris Avant-Garde,” Discourse 12.1 (1989-90): 3-27.

Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Hadlock, Richard. Jazz Masters of the Twenties. New York: Da Capo, 1988.

Jablonski, Edward. Gershwin: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1987.

James, Burnett. Bix Beiderbecke. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961.

Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. David Macey. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Mansell, Darrell. “The Jazz History of the World in The Great Gatsby.” English Language Notes 25.2 (1987): 57-62.

Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Stearns, Marshall W. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1959.

Tomkins, Calvin. Living Well Is the Best Revenge. New York: Viking, 1962.

Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner's, 1962.

Williams, Martin. The Jazz Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.