Blue Notes

Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness

Sam V. H. Reese

• Editorial: LSU Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780807172025
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Critica letteraria

Jazz can be uplifting, stimulating, sensual, and spiritual. Yet when writers turn to this form of music, they almost always imagine it in terms of loneliness. In Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Sam V. H. Reese investigates literary representations of jazz and the cultural narratives often associated with it, noting how they have, in turn, shaped readers' judgments and assumptions about the music. This illuminating critical study contemplates the relationship between jazz and literature from a perspective that musicians themselves regularly call upon to characterize their performances: that of the conversation. Reese traces the tradition of literary appropriations of jazz, both as subject matter and as aesthetic structure, in order to show how writers turn to this genre of music as an avenue for exploring aspects of human loneliness. In turn, jazz musicians have often looked to literature—sometimes obliquely, sometimes centrally—for inspiration. Reese devotes particular attention to how several revolutionary jazz artists used the written word as a way to express, in concrete terms, something their music could only allude to or affectively evoke. By analyzing these exchanges between music and literature, Blue Notes refines and expands the cultural meaning of being alone, stressing how loneliness can create beauty, empathy, and understanding. Reese analyzes a body of prose writings that includes Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and midcentury short fiction by James Baldwin, Julio Cortázar, Langston Hughes, and Eudora Welty. Alongside this vibrant tradition of jazz literature, Reese considers the autobiographies of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, as well as works by a range of contemporary writers including Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Zadie Smith. Throughout, Blue Notes offers original perspectives on the disparate ways in which writers acknowledge the expansive side of loneliness, reimagining solitude through narratives of connected isolation.

1

IN A
MINOR KEY

The Solo, Improvisation, and the Jazz Short Story

The short story has enjoyed a (comparatively) long and intimate relationship with jazz; from the literary critic’s perspective, jazz almost begins with the short story, in the guise of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 epoch-naming volume, Tales of the Jazz Age. Not only did this book represent, even cement, the status of jazz as the defining aesthetic of the American 1920s and 1930s, it also authorized a particular association between short stories and jazz (as subject, tone, and stylistic influence). The ongoing importance and commercial success of this relationship is best exemplified by the number of volumes—including Chris Parker’s 1986 collection B Flat, Bebop, Scat: Jazz Short Stories and Poems, Richard N. Albert’s 1990 volume From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction, Marcela Breton’s Hot and Cool: Jazz Short Stories (of the same year), and Sascha Feinstein and David Rife’s 2009 Jazz Fiction Anthology—that anthologize and valorize the jazz short story as its own identifiable genre. But although these collections almost all include stories that range from Fitzgerald’s jazz age to their present moment, by looking at the way this genre has evolved since the 1920s, one rapidly sees that particular tropes and narrative patterns started to recur in jazz fiction around the middle of the twentieth century, distinct from those initial appropriations of jazz.

As anyone who has been disappointed by Fitzgerald’s volume will know, earlier short-story writers tended to overlook the musicians who created jazz, and focus on the music itself as a ready-made form of cultural capital. Indeed, as Ryan Jerving argues, jazz was “most often sounded” in 1920s literature in order to express “an affirmative relation to its time and place.”¹ This tendency in turn reflected the commercial nature of the short story at the start of the twentieth century, where a writer like Fitzgerald saw himself as “whoring his talents” writing short stories for “the popular magazines” whose financial support “sustained him throughout his writing career.”² Starting in 1934 with an early (perhaps originating) version by Langston Hughes, however, and with prominent examples by writers as disparate as Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Yates, a distinctive genre of “jazz story” developed over the 1940s and 1950s that instead focused squarely on the jazz musician: in particular, a virtuosic performer who struggles with isolation and loneliness.

That this period should see writers increasingly turn to jazz as a way of grappling with the parameters and possibilities of loneliness should not be surprising. The period that Riesman characterized as the age of “the lonely crowd” was bookended by works like Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Yates’s 1962 collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness; the subject was clearly at the forefront of the American literary psyche. Indeed, as Mary Caputi argues convincingly in A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, the pressures of conformity and homogeneity led to an endemic experience of “loneliness and despair.”³ In turn, the performance of jazz was itself increasingly staged as an act of independence and nonconformist rebellion; Steven Elworth has shown that, by the 1940s, jazz was “no longer an important element in the dominant pop music of the day,” and instead was promoted as “an art music created primarily by young urban African Americans, part of a subculture with its own somewhat scandalous cultural codes and the use of various illegal drugs.”⁴ The jazz musician was consequently associated with individuality, nonconformity, and social isolation. At the same time, the popularity of the short story as a literary form, particularly among established writers, grew significantly over the course of the 1940s. Indeed, reflecting on the previous year in an article from 1951, the prominent critic Leslie Fiedler noted in wonder that there had “never been so favourable a moment for the short story,” echoing similar summative reviews by Irving Howe, Nolan Miller, and Edith Mirrielees.⁵ But this popularity was not commensurate with an authoritative status—instead, the short story continued to be associated with a narrow focus and limited social relevance. Within the context of American publishing and criticism, it remained a minor form compared to the dominant mode of the novel.

Indeed, it was the minor aesthetics of the short story—in terms of its limited focus, constrained size, and oppositional relationship to the novel—that led writers as early as Hughes to turn to the short story as a structure for exploring the concept of loneliness through jazz. As Mary Louise Pratt has shown, critics’ frequent recourse to the qualities of the novel when trying to define the short story is not in itself a sign of laziness, but instead a direct consequence of a tendency in “highly institutionalized forms of discourse, like verbal art,” toward “pairs of short and long genres.”⁶ Although specialists in the short story like to maintain the idea that it is “an autonomous genre,” Pratt makes the useful observation that (in English, at least) the form of the short story is essentially defined by its brevity; given that “the conceptual aspect is that shortness cannot be an intrinsic property of anything, but occurs only relative to something else,” whenever writers come to define the short story, they almost inevitably do so in contradistinction to the “long story,” or novel.⁷ This is because the qualities that critics have routinely ascribed to the genre since the essays of Edgar Allan Poe—self-containedness, compression, focus on an individual rather than a group or community, unity of effect—all rely on an implicit contrast with a longer form that emphasizes the alternative. From this perspective, the form of the short story is not just minor for being short, but minor in that it embraces the qualities neglected by the major form of the novel.

In one light, this is a positive quality of the form; Poe certainly valorized the unifying effect of a narrow, constrained aesthetic model. Many critics, particularly in the mid-twentieth-century United States,
however, equated the minor aesthetics of the short story with fragmentation and isolation. In a 1945 essay on “The Structure of the Modern Short Story,” for instance, A. L. Balder observed that “the modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous—
frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.”⁸ His charge that in such stories “nothing happens” in fact conflated two frequent attacks on the short story: sometimes it implies “that nothing significant happens,” while sometimes it means more generally that “the modern short story is charged with a lack of narrative structure.” These critiques had a particular urgency at a time when American critics were concerned with promoting the more democratic form of the novel; equally, they echo comments that continue to be raised against the short story. They point to the “lurking associations” behind the juxtaposition of short fiction and novels: “if the short story is not a ‘full-length’ narrative it cannot narrate a full-length life; it can narrate a fragment or excerpt of a life. And if from that fragment one can deduce things about the whole life, then the more novel-like, the more complete, the story is.”⁹ It makes sense, then, that the short story should be associated with isolation and loneliness, for its minor aesthetics—as Deleuze and Guattari argued of Kafka—offer a way for writers to retreat from the sociability and totality associated with the novel. As Hughes’s story “The Blues I’m Playing” demonstrates, moreover, the short story also offers the writer aware of the rhetoric around the two genres a way to question the prevailing assumptions about loneliness and the short story, by emphasizing the expansive possibilities of both.

PLAYING THE BLUES: LONELINESS, THE SOLO, AND IMPROVISATION

Hughes’s early jazz story “The Blues I’m Playing” (from his 1934 volume, The Ways of White Folks) had a profound effect on the way other writers would construct stories around jazz soloists. Focused on a prodigious black female pianist, “The Blues I’m Playing” deliberately points to the long-established tropes around isolated artistic brilliance. Rather than simply eliding the virtuosic jazz musician with the larger mythology of the isolated and tormented romantic
genius, however, Hughes instead emphasized that brilliance as a musician came from a connection with a wider community, in the process moving the music’s register from the blues to jazz.

At least on the surface, however, the formal elements of the story would seem to contradict this thematic movement toward connection. As theorists like Pratt are quick to emphasize, because it is defined by its limited size, any short story must inherently narrate events limited in scope, detail, or both. Nobody writing in the 1930s exemplified this trend more than Hughes’s contemporary Ernest Hemingway, whose “famous prose style—plain words, simple but artfully structured syntax, the direct presentation of the object”—was coupled with a subject matter that focused insistently on “the fragmentary nature of modern life, with its small local victories and defeats, its focus on the present moment and its prevailing mood of disillusion.”¹⁰ In the American short story of the 1930s through the 1950s, then, this intrinsic quality of “limitation” was elevated to the defining stylistic feature—and “The Blues I’m Playing,” with its close focus on a pair of characters and their relationship, and a narrative organized around a final turning point or moment of epiphany, foregrounds precisely such stylistic compression. The title, moreover, immediately suggests a connection between loneliness and jazz, riffing on the popular connotations of “the blues,” so that, on the surface, the formal limitations of the story appear to reinforce the protagonist’s isolation, and the pain that is associated with her music. Hughes’s story was to prove so influential, however, because of the way it subverted the expectations established by both the title and the oppressive loneliness within the story, to offer a redemptive, expansive vision of being an individual, and being alone.

The story charts the relationship between an elderly white widow, Mrs. Ellsworth, and her “protégée” (78), the talented young (and crucially, black) pianist, Oceola. A patron to a number of artists, Mrs. Ellsworth expects Oceola to dedicate her life to perfecting her music, living the “beautiful life” of one of “the few beautiful people who live for their art—and nothing else” (83). Idealizing a romantic narrative of sacrifice, wherein the artist rejects earthly pleasures in dedication to art, she encourages Oceola to give up her teaching and performances at churches, believing that “she must learn to sublimate her soul” (78). Crucially, this means rejecting love and emotional fulfillment; Mrs. Ellsworth tries to talk Oceola out of marrying a black medical student, Pete, and after they are engaged, blames “Pete’s influence on her protégée” for a less-than-perfect performance: “All that time you were playing on that stage, he was here, the monster! Taking you out of yourself, taking you away from the piano” (81). The kind of “beautiful” art that Mrs. Ellsworth wants her to create, moreover, is restricted to traditional genres: despite Oceola’s love of jazz, Mrs. Ellsworth expects her to only play classical pieces, believing still “in art of the old school, portraits that really and truly looked like people, poems about nature, music that had soul in it, not syncopation” (78). Hughes takes great pains not only to expose the coldness that lies beneath traditional expectations of genius—that “art is bigger than love” (83)—but also to show the incompatibility of such isolation with jazz.

Ultimately, Oceola rejects her patron’s expectations of her lifestyle as an artist, and the kind of music she can produce. In the final action of the story, she breaks free from her patron’s stifling expectations, performing an earth-moving jazz improvisation at Mrs. Ellsworth’s house. By the time Hughes depicts this climactic, syncopated performance, however, he has already shown Oceola regularly questioning the validity of her patron’s idealized artistic life, wondering why “white folks think you could live on nothing but art?” (83). For a period, Mrs. Ellsworth pays for Oceola to live and study in France, where for the first time she mixes with a group of “serious” (rather than syncopated) artists. She cannot, however, understand how they can “argue so much about life or art,” juxtaposing their pained and intellectualized engagement with art against her own organic, holistic experience of music: she “merely lived—and loved it” (79). In defiance of her patron’s sacrificial expectations, moreover, Oceola maintains that she doesn’t need to be isolated from other to create beautiful music. She forcefully demonstrates this not only through her relationship with Pete, but her insistence on continuing to perform in her community: “she still loved to play for Harlem house parties,” where she no longer performed for money, but instead “out of the sheer love of jazz” (78).

Indeed, her joy and success as an artist are directly connected to her relationships with others. It is telling that, despite the reference to “blues” in the title, within the story Hughes describes Oceola’s performances as “jazz.” Like recent theorists, Hughes himself defined jazz in terms of its group dynamic—so that, in his well-known speech on “Jazz as Communication,” he argues that the blues is a form of jazz when it moves toward communication. Within “The Blues I’m Playing,” certainly, Hughes characterizes Oceola’s jazz performance as a form of musical expression that gains strength from a sense of community. It is what allows her to break down the loneliness that she otherwise feels in Paris: performing jazz at a black club, her music transcends the question of technical skill and instead takes on a communicative function. In a moment of transcendent signification, she makes “the bass notes throb like tom-toms, the trebles cry like little flutes, so deep in the earth and so high in the sky that they understood everything” (79). This sense of shared understanding, bringing together the members of the audience and the performer, is reinforced by their unity of movement, and the pure pleasure Oceola feels when “the night club would get up and dance to her blues.” Far from living for her art, Hughes asks us to see Oceola as living through her art.

Beyond the harmony created in the club, however, the story probes a broader question of community, to which Hughes would return a number of times in his career: whether art, particularly music, can overcome the racial divide in America. Oceola, on the one hand, seems to reject the idea that music could facilitate cross-racial unity, simply declaring “Bunk!” to the “cultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchings” (79). And her stance seems justified, in light of Mrs. Ellsworth’s disdain for jazz, and horror at her performance in the final stages of the book. But equally, Oceola herself comes to define jazz as a form of artistic expression that brings together black and white, characterizing it through a bivalent aesthetic that encompasses dual
emotions—“Listen! . . . How sad and gay it...