Title: the Jazz History of the World in the Great Gatsby

Title: The Jazz History of the World in The Great Gatsby

Author(s): Darrel Mansell

Publication Details: English Language Notes 25 (Dec. 1987): p57-62.

Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski. Vol. 157. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

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[(essay date December 1987) In the following essay, Mansell suggests possible sources of and purposes for a reference to a jazz work in a scene of Gatsby.]

Fitzgerald said in retrospect that his first novel had actually been not one book but three, and his second novel two. He wanted his third novel to be more coherent: more spare, economical and "intricately patterned." Indeed he wanted the new one to be "perfect."1

The critical consensus has been that what he produced is close to perfect. In The Great Gatsby there seem almost no loose, unworking parts--no automobile wheels lying in the ditch like the one after a Gatsby party, "unconnected to the car by any physical bond" (Chapter III). The novel is said to have "perfection of form," to be "compact," "tightly structured," to have a "tight inevitability of ... construction," to have a "formal completeness and integrity."2

But there is at least one episode lying outside just about any conception of the formal integrity of the novel--one wheel lying loose in the ditch. That is the scene when the orchestra leader at the fateful party in Chapter III announces a musical work by a Mr. Vladimir Tostoff: the Jazz History of the World. Nick says that when the work was over

girls were putting their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups, knowing that some one would arrest their falls. ...3

What are we to think of a piece of music with such a title? Why did the work create a sensation at Carnegie Hall the previous May (as the orchestra leader says it did)? Why does he say so "with jovial condescension"? Why does the audience laugh when he says so? Surely we aren't to take a sensational piece with such a preposterous title as moving or beautiful--Nick says the nature of the music simply eludes him. Yet the piece has a strange, mesmerizing effect on the party-goers; and, most strange of all, had in the manuscript of the novel a deeply moving effect on Nick himself. There he strives--Fitzgerald strives--for three turgid paragraphs omitted from the published novel to make us understand and feel something which seems to have taken a profound emotional hold on the author himself:

It facinated [sic] me ... it started out with a wierd [sic], 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 great distance away. A rhythm became distinguishable after awhile in the spinning, a sort of dull beat but as soon as you'd almost made it out it disappeared. ... The second movement was concerned with the bell only it wasn't the bell any more but a muted violin cello and two instruments I had never seen before ... 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 seemed to look around 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 even stronger emotion. I know so little about music that I can only make a story of it ... but it wasn't really a story ... there would be a series of interruptive notes that seemed to fall together accidentally 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. ... 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 [sic] of The Beale Street Blues.4

It is not impossible to make sense of this curious episode--to think of some relevance it has to the novel. Indeed almost every interpretation of the novel has a way of doing so. For instance the novel is said to be concerned with time; and the Jazz History of the World shows that concern in being a juxtaposition of the timeless (history) and the evanescent (jazz).5 Or Tostoff's composition is, "amid the tossed-off names and the tossed-off identities ... a piece of music that is itself a tossed-off debasement of the idea of history."6 Or Gatsby himself is a kind of showman, an entrepreneur; and this "musical extravaganza" is one of his meretricious productions.7 Or this sprawling and chaotic musical composition shows the hugeness of Gatsby's parties, their "movement, mingling, and commotion."8 Or the composition's non-linearity, polyphony and complex rhythms are "like a buried preface, an anamorphic projection of the book's operative principle."9 Or the composition's sensuality shows the "chaos and libertinism of Gatsby's world."10

There is just no consensus as to the relevance or significance of this puzzling episode. Fitzgerald himself regretted having written it: "I thought that the whole episode ... was rotten."11

I think there is something of a factual, historical nature to be said about the episode. Fitzgerald liked to date his scenes by putting in them specific details his readers would associate with a particular year. Often such details have to do with music. The song "Poor Butterfly," played on a gramophone at Princeton in a scene in This Side of Paradise, "had been the song of that last year" (Chapter IV)--the year 1917. The song "Something Seems Tingleingleing" is described in a scene in The Beautiful and Damned as "the year's mellowest fox-trot" (Chapter II)--thus 1913 (from the 1913 musical High Jinks). In The Great Gatsby the orchestras in Daisy's Louisville are said to set "the rhythm of the year" with songs like the "Beale Street Blues" (Chapter VIII)--the year 1918. And "Three O'Clock in the Morning," played at one of Gatsby's parties, is a "neat, sad little waltz of that year" (Chapter VI)--the year 1922.

The Jazz History of the World may be just such a piece of music dating a scene. The orchestra leader says the piece "attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation" (50). That would have been May, 1921 (the scene being the summer of 1922).

It happens that during the concert season of 1921 the great composer Richard Strauss was making a much-publicized tour of the United States conducting his own compositions with various symphony orchestras. The month of May that year would have been off-season at Carnegie Hall; but on 31 October Strauss conducted a program of his own music there. The music critic Richard Aldrich wrote next day that the hall "was filled to at least its legal capacity" to hear the celebrated composer; the audience greeted his appearance with a great roar of applause that lasted some time.12

Scheduled for that Carnegie Hall concert (but replaced at the last minute) had been Strauss's symphonic work Also Sprach Zarathustra. This piece was subsequently performed (Strauss conducting) on 15 November at the Metropolitan Opera House. A "large audience that practically filled the house" gave the concert enthusiastic appreciation (New York Times, 16 November 1921, 22c). Now there must be only one actual symphonic piece extant which ever became known as a history of the world like the piece played at Gatsby's party. That is Strauss's Zarathustra. Its author himself described it as "an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development ..." (these words appear in the Times concert review cited above). Furthermore, the bell Nick makes so much of in the long description of the piece cancelled by Fitzgerald is probably the much-noted bell which peals in the Nachtwanderlied section of Strauss's work.

I think Fitzgerald's idea of a 1921 performance at Carnegie Hall of a composition on such an unusual, not to say bizarre, theme as the history of the world--a performance enthusiastically received and subsequently written up in the papers--grew out of these actual circumstances (Strauss's name being changed in the manuscript of the novel to Leo Epstein, then to Tostoff). I think Fitzgerald read about the concert in the papers ("If you read the papers," the orchestra leader says). Fitzgerald was in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the time, where he wrote some book reviews for the New York papers.13 Furthermore, I think that at the time of the composition of the novel he knew Zarathustra itself at least vaguely from having heard it (in addition to concert performances there was at least one phonograph recording by 1924). Nick's puzzled fascination with the piece was Fitzgerald's own. Indeed Zarathustra celebrates the Nietzschean superman so often referred to in Fitzgerald's fiction.

What is puzzling in the Jazz History of the World episode may therefore be explicable more or less as follows. Fitzgerald wanted to date his scene by reference to a particular musical event of 1921 which had caught his attention: a well-publicized performance of a composition reported (in the Times) to have been conceived by its author as nothing less than a history of the world. Furthermore, Fitzgerald actually knew and had been arrested by Strauss's composition. He struggled unsuccessfully in the manuscript of his novel to get his fascination into Nick's remarkably long, profoundly-felt and groping attempt to describe the Epstein-Tostoff piece of music heard at Gatsby's party (by no means all of Nick's description in the manuscript applies to Also Sprach Zarathustra).

At the same time Fitzgerald was also trying in the scene to do something else. He wanted the piece of music in the novel to be just right for one of Gatsby's parties. Hence Strauss is transmogrified into a jazz history of the world. In the early twenties "jazzing" the classics was very much an issue--generally thought to be a sign of the creeping vulgarization of culture. Aldrich for instance took that position in an indignant newspaper article of 1922 ("Jazz draws the line nowhere. Nothing is safe from its devastating touch. The jazz blacksmiths ... lay violent hands upon music that musicians have always approached with respect and ... reverence").14 In the manuscript even the members of the orchestra at the party are themselves described as disdainful of what they are about to play: they "looked at one another and smiled as tho this was ... a little below them. ..."15

Such a piece of music at one of Gatsby's parties plays on a major theme in the novel: America's brash, energetic and meretricious vulgarization of European culture. A jazz history of the world--just right at a house where Klipspringer plays The Love Nest on the piano in the Marie Antoinette music room (92, 96); just right at a house which is itself an imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy (5); just right in a novel where Myrtle Wilson's New York apartment is trying to summon up an image of Versailles (29).

Fitzgerald just was not successful in bringing these two ideas together: the Jazz History of the World as strange beauty and as the vulgarization of culture. At the last minute he threw out the former and replaced it with nothing but Nick's hasty remark, "The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me." Then Fitzgerald went straight to the next scene as already written. The novel's central figure suddenly materializes ("my eyes fell on Gatsby") as if summoned up out of the music to be its very embodiment--its beauty and vulgarity.

Notes

1. For Fitzgerald's comment on This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned see his letter to Maxwell Perkins, ca. April 16, 1924, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York, 1963), p. 163. For Fitzgerald on wanting his new novel to be "intricately patterned" see his letter to Perkins, ca. July, 1922, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Margaret M. Duggan (New York, 1980), [112]. For "perfect," Fitzgerald's letter to Perkins ca. December 20, 1924, Letters, ed. Turnbull, p. 172.

2. Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1967), p. 172 ("perfection of form"). James E. Miller, Jr., F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1964), p. 103 ("compact"). Richard D. Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Carbondale, 1966), p. 118 ("tightly structured"). Kenneth Eble, F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1963), p. 91 ("tight inevitability ..."). David Laird, "Hallucinations and History in The Great Gatsby," South Dakota Review, 15 No. 1 (1977), p. 19 ("formal completeness ...").

3. The Great Gatsby (New York, 1953), p. 50; page references hereafter appear in parentheses in my text.

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, 1973), pp. 54-55.

5. Bruce Bawer, "'I Could Still Hear the Music': Jay Gatsby and the Musical Metaphor," Notes on Modern American Literature, 5 (1981), Item 25.

6. Milton R. Stern, The Golden Moment (Urbana, 1970), p. 217.

7. B. W. Wilson, "The Theatrical Motif in The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1975), p. 110.